The Agilent Foundation, supported by Agilent Technologies, has announced a collaboration to support leukemia research at the Ideker Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.
The lab is investigating the relationships between genetic variations and proteins in the search for better methods of analysing the disease.
The collaboration includes scientific and financial support.
'Prof Trey Ideker's team will explore a promising new approach for recognising the mechanism that triggers leukemia using multiple scientific disciplines,' said Allan Kuchinsky, the Agilent Laboratories scientist sponsoring the Ideker Lab for the Agilent Foundation support.
'This could produce a powerful new tool for detection and treatment,' he added.
'This support from the Agilent Foundation will allow us to develop a system for analysing proteomics data to map pathways, and for finding protein-network biomarkers of cancer,' said Prof Ideker.
'Agilent and UCSD have a longstanding collaboration in the network biology space, and we've jointly developed the Cytoscape application,' he added.
Cytoscape is a software platform developed by an international consortium of open-source developers, used mainly for visualising molecular interaction networks.
Ideker is also the recipient of the 2009 Overton Prize, awarded each year to an early to mid career scientist making a significant contribution to the field of computational biology.
Agilent's contribution to the University of California, San Diego is a result of Agilent's University Relations Program.
Agilent and the Agilent Foundation support research in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and informatics, advancing understanding of the life sciences through measurement.
