Are there still the issues with inter-platform data comparability that existed in previous years?
Victory has been declared multiple times. The last time I addressed this with my own work was in 2005. there were three papers that appeared [in an issue of Nature Methods] and they all came to the conclusion that arrays give you insight into fundamental biology across all platforms. I think part of the problem is that often when people talk about comparability between different platforms we convolute two different arguments. If you take two samples and profile them across different platforms, you can deduce the underlying biology across those platforms. They give you consistent results. The real challenge is not arrays but a more fundamental challenge when you look across platforms between studies. When we do that we are looking at different populations and different things. The big challenge comes down to the fact that any disease we’ve looked at is more heterogeneous than we recognized even a short time ago. There are definitely underlying mechanisms and causes behind diseases. The
