Case Study: Massachusetts Institute of Technology achieves faster cancer biomarker discovery and integrates research and teaching with MathWorks (MATLAB)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Integrates Cancer Research in the Lab and Classroom

MIT researchers aimed to diagnose cancer earlier by analyzing millions of mass‑spectrometry (MS) data points and modeling large protein interaction networks (about 20,000 nodes and 100,000 edges), while also teaching students who needed an easy‑to‑learn tool. To meet this challenge MIT standardized on MathWorks' MATLAB and associated toolboxes to apply signal‑processing, bioinformatics, statistical and parallel‑computing methods without extensive programming overhead.

MathWorks' MATLAB together with Signal Processing Toolbox, Bioinformatics Toolbox, Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox, Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Parallel Server let MIT preprocess MS data, build and visualize large biomolecular networks, and run analyses in parallel on a cluster. As a result computation time dropped by an order of magnitude (from roughly a week to well under a day), students quickly contributed to research, and one student earned an MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program grant.

MIT

Gil Alterovitz

NIH Biomedical Informatics Fellow