Institute of Cancer Research - Part I: Beyond the visual: How Vortex speeds up data processing

Vortex, the data visualisation and analysis solution from Dotmatics, has reduced the processing time for a Thermal Shift Assay from half a day to less than one hour at the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). When combined with other integrated products in the Dotmatics suite, such as Browser, Vortex can have a great impact on the productivity and efficiency of a research organisation.

Before the software’s deployment, many scientists at The Cancer Therapeutics Unit used an Excel spreadsheet to copy and paste raw values from Thermal Shift Assay readers output before evaluating the plots to set the minimum/maximum. They would then copy and paste a subset of that data into GraphPad Prism, before copying the results back into the Excel spreadsheet for further analysis. While this is a common practice it is not very effective as the use of spreadsheets does have its limitations – not least of which is that it is quite laborious.