Experiences in designing a distributed service-oriented platform for in-silico biomarker discovery and validation

In order to design efficient biomarkers for personalized medicine, one needs correlated insights from different multi-omics perspectives, such as proteomics, genomics, transcriptomics etc. In this paper, we address the challenge of integrating multi-omics data repositories for in-silico biomarker discovery and validation. For that, we have designed a software platform based on the genomic and proteomic data overlay. Currently, this platform provides an integrated way of querying bioinformatics major data sources such as GenBank, UniProt, and ArrayExpress. Our approach integrates the client-side API of these resources with the support of web services and cloud (Google App Engine), as enabling technologies. As such, the extension of the platform with further omics data sources becomes straightforward. The platform was evaluated on the Google Cloud. The first results are promising, showing that the queries can easily be formulated and executed against these public community resources, the overhead introduced by our services being rather small.