DNAnexus Announces Collaboration With AlidaBio To Enhance RNA Modification and Expression Analysis

DNAnexus, Inc., and Alida Biosciences (AlidaBio), announced a strategic collaboration designed to accelerate discovery and advance research into epitranscriptomics activity, the complex chemical modifications to RNA that regulate gene expression.

Epitranscriptomics research has the potential to significantly affect patient lives. Gaining an understanding of RNA epigenetic modifications offers opportunities for identifying new biomarkers and drug targets that are associated with diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders. These markers can indicate how patients will respond to certain treatments and help ensure they are enrolled in the right clinical trials that match them to the treatments most likely to give positive outcomes. The DNAnexus collaboration with Alida Biosciences allows researchers to establish these markers, enabling more personalized medicine approaches.

As part of the collaboration, AlidaBio’s EpiScout™ Analysis Suite Application will be exclusively hosted on the DNAnexus cloud platform. The user-friendly informatics solution was designed to accurately detect, analyze, and visualize epitranscriptomics activity. The EpiScout software analyzes data from sequencing libraries produced with AlidaBio’s EpiPlex™ RNA modification encoding kits. It includes custom algorithms for data normalization and uses machine learning-based peak calling technology to accurately identify regions of significant read enrichment and quantify the peaks. With seamless interpretation and data sharing, researchers can focus on biological discovery and large-scale experiments rather than technological challenges and workflow limitations.

“AlidaBio is proud to be part of the DNAnexus ecosystem for precision health data,” said Gudrun Stengel, PhD, CEO of AlidaBio. “The EpiScout application is an intuitive, cost-effective solution designed to accelerate the data-to-answer workflow for labs without specialized epitranscriptomics bioinformatics expertise.”

“While NGS data is common today, complex analyses often require specific bioinformatics expertise. A cloud-based analysis tool like the DNAnexus platform empowers scientists at any level to analyze data while ensuring reproducibility,” said Hoang Quoc Hai Pham, graduate student, City of Hope National Medical Center. “It also makes data more accessible and easily shareable with collaborators. I enjoyed using it for my [EpiPlex] m6A-seq samples.”

Today, DNAnexus has more than 45,000 registered users across 48 countries and actively manages more than 105 petabytes of complex clinical, genomic, proteomic, and other multiomic datasets on behalf of a growing network of collaborators. Its comprehensive enterprise platform for precision health data meets the most rigorous industry standards for data quality, security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.

“This collaboration with AlidaBio is a great example of how we continue to expand our cloud-based applications and enable our customers to unlock more actionable information hidden in their large multiomic datasets,” said Thomas Laur, CEO of DNAnexus. “Together, we are making these easy-to-use epitranscriptomics tools accessible, empowering more researchers worldwide to discover the next wave of biomarkers and therapeutics.”