Helsinki 29.9.2011 - MediSapiens Ltd, a Finnish bioinformatics company, has released the most comprehensive map of human gene expression yet for public use. The data is available through a graphical tool, Transcriptome Viewer, at the home page of MediSapiens Ltd, allowing exploration of the expression activity of genes across chromosomes in tens of healthy human tissues. Since the sequencing of the human genome, understanding which genes are expressed in which tissues and diseases has been recognized as a key step towards understanding the genes' functions. From a genetic point of view the expression activity of a gene is a fundamental requirement for its potential function to be fulfilled and therefore one crucial piece in the big puzzle of how human cells work in health and disease.

“The beauty and simplicity of this compilation of human gene expression activity is stunning, providing comprehensive and straightforward answers to where and when genes are expressed”, comments Tommi Pisto, CEO of MediSapiens Ltd.

Data upon which this tool is built were collected from public science and in itself it is the largest fully integrated gene expression collection in the world. “The most notable fact about this data collection is that it combines the best parts of the efforts of the global biomedical research community in understanding gene expression activity”, adds Sami Kilpinen, CSO of MediSapiens Ltd.

The entire wealth of over 300 million data points of manually curated and fully integrated gene expression information is available from IST Online®. With the graphical tools available in IST Online, one can explore genome-wide expression profiles of over 20,000 samples, containing for example more than 13,000 in vivo cancer patient profiles.