Xymp™ Bioassay System
Statistical software for designing, analyzing, and validating potency assays
Overview
Xymp™ was a software platform developed while I was working at Precision Bioassay with David Lansky. Biological therapeutics require rigorous potency assays to ensure product safety, efficacy, and regulatory acceptance.
At the same time, bioassay development is fraught with subtle statistical challenges, among those: pseudoreplication—when sample generation or experimental design introduces replicate measurements that are not truly independent; Plate-level effects: The 96-well plate itself introduces systematic sources of variance that must be treated as a statistical block or a more sophisticated design; Poor randomization: Ad-hoc sample placement misses opportunities to use structured designs that reduce confounding; Naive outlier detection: Removing outliers before re-scaling data is ineffective and masks the true sources of variance
We created software that addressed all of that in one package. We used it in-house for many projects, and also created a web-interface that could be used with clients.
The software was developed in R, and the web interface in PHP with a MYSQL backend.