The IntOGen interface

Sometimes, there is a gap between experimental biology and clinical medicine while a continuous interchange would be auspicial to well direct experiments and keep updated the therapies. An interesting tool has been developed at the Barcelona Medical Research Park (Spain).
IntOGen is a frame work that collects, integrates and manages data derived from genome- wide experiments on large scale projects such as the Cancer Genome Atlas and the International Cancer Genome Consortium. Scientists manually annotate all samples by using the International Classification of Disease for Oncology vocabulary, in terms of tumour topography and morphology. Furthermore, they apply statistical methods to identify the most relevant alterations, by analyzing multiple studies on the same kind of tumour. Finally, they consider the role of whole biological modules, such as a pathway, to demonstrate the involvement of a single gene altered. The website www.intogen.org is available for free and allows to know modules and genes important in cancer, share experiments and analyze data in the context of cancer. This interface has been built to fill the gap between medicine and molecular biology. Similar tools should be really useful not only for cancer but also for other kind of diseases, such as neurodegenerative disorders.