Katharina Waury
Fellowship project title: Bioinformatics software to accelerate biomarker assay development
The goal: Incorporating bioinformatics software is a way to support and accelerate the development of novel assays to measure fluid biomarkers in a patient’s fluid, such as blood. The project aims to increase awareness of available bioinformatics tools that can support the biomarker assay development and foster a more collaborative approach to software development between biomarker researchers and bioinformatics software developers.
The why: Biomarkers are urgently needed to diagnose patients and track their disease progression. Especially, fluid biomarkers have enormous potential to support clinical practice. However, the biomarker development process is challenging and rarely reaches the clinic and the patients. Specifically, implementation of novel assays which use antibodies to detect protein biomarkers is often unsuccessful. While the use of research software is a way to support biomarker development. the potential is currently largely untapped. Biomarker researchers are often not aware of the many available tools and are dissuaded to work with them when the software is not easy to understand and use.
