Axiope Addresses Biomedical Data Archiving with NIH SBIR Funding

Cambridge, MA, March 31, 2006. Axiope Inc., today announced that the Company has completed a $400,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research Grant (SBIR) from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The grant investigated the feasibility of innovative methods for archiving, auditing, and sharing scientific data. The system serves the data management needs of individual research labs, core facilities, and multi-lab research consortia.

The improvements to Catalyzer assist investigators with meeting regulatory and intellectual property requirements for data archiving. The system also gives the investigator greater flexibility in modeling research processes while maintaining personal control over the system's development and deployment.

The new capabilities were field-tested by Children's Hospital Boston and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), two institutions with site-wide deployments of Catalyzer. The project also included feedback from scientists using Catalyzer in over 20 publicly-funded and corporate biomedical research institutions.

SBIR Specific Aims
This Phase I SBIR project designed, prototyped and tested a new collaborative, investigator-oriented research data management system. The system is designed to work with a commercially successful, personal research data management application, Catalyzer Desktop, which was developed by consultants to the project. Catalyzer Desktop has been adopted by many investigators with data organization or database development needs. It now supports the data sharing, auditing, and archiving needs that often arise in the life cycle of a project as collaborations are formed or core facilities begin to scale up.

The new collaborative system was devised in response to direct feedback from scientists using Catalyzer Desktop in over 20 publicly-funded and corporate biomedical research institutions. The system serves the data management needs of individual research labs, core facilities, and multi-lab research consortia.

This project developed and tested Catalyzer Workgroup Server (CWS), a scalable multi-user server that complements the existing database development environment of the Catalyzer Desktop application. CWS assists investigators with meeting regulatory and intellectual property requirements such as audit trails and secure archiving as well as the NIH data-sharing requirements. CWS enables collaboration through on-line data sharing and reporting, and addresses the scalability and security issues that arise in the growth of projects. It gives the investigator the flexibility in modeling research processes and support for evolving data types, while maintaining personal control over the system's development and deployment.

The project focused on multi-user access to collaborative data services designed for high scalability. Subsequently it focused on the creation, maintenance, and navigation of all historical data modifications in a fully searchable archive. The specific aims were:

• Flexible desktop to server data publishing: managing the transfer of data while maintaining the relationships between files and their derived metadata across multiple storage locations.
• Scalable data archiving, searching and browsing: centralized storage of data with a high performance search and browse interface.
• Secure access control and administration: user authentication and data access permission schemes.
• On-line concurrent data editing: serialized multi-user editing of a central data store.
• Searching across multiple data versions: text and time-based querying over historical data modifications.
• Space-efficient storage of data modifications: reducing data redundancy through intelligent storage representations of multiple versions of data..

Axiope worked with a small number of scientific partners to focus the project on specific needs, and to provide a real-life setting for evaluation. These partners were drawn from a wider pool of similar organizations already using the Catalyzer desktop tool. For initial feasibility testing, Axiope included scientists using a range of experimental methods. This ensured that the solution is both widely applicable and grounded in market need.

About Axiope
Axiope is an innovative provider of investigator-oriented software for scientific data integration and collaboration. Axiope's Catalyzer significantly reduces the complexity of organizing experimental data and creating laboratory databases. Catalyzer easily links images, data files, analytical results, and documents, and makes them searchable and sharable on the web. From personal data management tools to multi-institutional collaboration systems, Axiope's intuitive software empowers scientists to create the database solutions that work best for them.
For more information about Axiope, please visit www.axiope.com