What is a "SWITCHGEAR" ?
(noun) ; A panel of switching and interrupting devices associated with the control, metering and overall regulation of electric power generation and distribution.At SwitchGear Genomics we are interested in the set of switching and interrupting devices that regulate expression of genes across the human genome.
SwitchGear Genomics was founded in March of 2005 by Dr. Richard Myers, Dr. Nathan Trinklein, and Dr. Shelley Force Aldred of Stanford University. The goal of SwitchGear Genomics is to provide custom research services and experimental tools to aid researchers in large-scale studies of transcriptional regulation. The inspiration for forming this company grew out of our previous work in the field of functional genomics and most recently as members of the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) Project Consortium funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute. The goal of the ENCODE Project is to apply new technologies and genomic scaling of existing methodologies to discover and characterize functional elements in 1% of the human genome. Our first-hand experience in the field of functional genomics and specifically our involvement in the ENCODE project has highlighted the unmet needs of researchers studying functional elements in the genome.
Our positions as leaders in the fields of computational regulatory element prediction, experimental validation, functional characterization, and data analysis put us in a unique position to fulfill these unmet needs by providing the research community with high-throughput tools to assay regulatory element function across the genome. The new tools and services offered by SwitchGear Genomics will enable researches to gather novel data, greatly enrich existing genomic datasets, and focus on experiments rather than resource development. The experimental results from the ENCODE project and other functional genomics studies demonstrate the tremendous value of combining multiple independent datasets to draw conclusions.
Our philosophy at SwitchGear Genomics is that conclusions can be made with much higher confidence by integrating the data from multiple independent genome-scale experiments. These integrated data sets will explain a transcriptional regulatory network in much greater detail than if the data sets were analyzed independent of one another.As leaders in the field of regulatory element analysis and experimentation, the SwitchGear team has the opportunity to look forward to growth in the company’s areas of influence. In the near future, the team will develop an in-house discovery research program focusing on biological regulatory networks that are relevant to human health. In addition to identifying important regulatory elements in these pathways, we will also study the variation in the sequence of these elements found in the human population. These sequence variants may play roles in determining disease susceptibility rates and differential drug response between individuals. Such information will aid the advance into the era of personalized medicine by leading to important diagnostic tools and identifying drugs that are the most likely to be effective and non-harmful for each individual given his or her genetic profile.