You generated the data.
Now comes the hard part.
Modern instruments are extraordinary at producing data — flow cytometry, spatial transcriptomics, sequencing, proteomics. Turning that data into something you can publish is where most labs get stuck. The expertise sits in a different department, the software feels like the cockpit of a space shuttle, and the deadline doesn't care.
Cytogence exists to close that gap.
A scientist who hit the same wall you're hitting
Cytogence was founded by Kenneth P. Hough, Ph.D., an immunologist who spent years on the wrong side of that gap. As a PhD student at UAB, he watched flow cytometry analysis get bottlenecked behind a single expensive, license-locked workstation — and on some projects, fall back to software that looked like it shipped on Windows 95. In 2013 he wrote his own flow analysis app, Cytopedia, to fix it. The prototype worked; PhD deadlines won. (It's back — today it's Cytogence FCS.)
The pattern repeated as his research moved from RNA-seq into ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, proteomics, lipidomics, and finally multi-omics: powerful platforms, painful tools — built for statisticians, not for the researcher staring at a deadline. Every time, the instinct was the same: build the thing that makes this reliable and repeatable.
That instinct became a company. Kenneth founded Cytogence, Inc. in 2020 to do bioinformatics the way he'd always wanted it done — rigorous, reproducible, and actually usable.
Kenneth P. Hough, Ph.D.
Founder & Principal Scientist
Kenneth is an immunologist who studied biochemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His 20+ peer-reviewed publications — including first-author work and a study in Nature Immunology — span immunology, cancer biology, and cell metabolism. He has spent his career on both sides of the data — at the bench generating it, and writing the software to make sense of it — and founded Cytogence to be the analysis partner he wished he'd had.
Selected publications
Full list on PubMed →-
Mechanotransduction-induced gene expression reveals activation of the TGFβ/SKIL/TAZ axis in triple-negative breast cancer
Co-authorCancer mechanobiology International Journal of Molecular Sciences · 2026
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Heavy metal exposure-mediated dysregulation of sphingolipid metabolism
Co-authorLipidomics Antioxidants · 2024
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Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase promotes AhR-dependent differentiation of regulatory B cells in lung cancer
Co-authorTumor immunology Frontiers in Immunology · 2021
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Mechanical strain induces phenotypic changes in breast cancer cells and promotes immunosuppression in the tumor microenvironment
Co-authorTumor microenvironment Laboratory Investigation · 2020
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Fibronectin on the surface of extracellular vesicles mediates fibroblast invasion
Co-authorPulmonary fibrosis American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology · 2019
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Myeloid-derived suppressor cells impair B cell responses in lung cancer through IL-7 and STAT5
Co-authorImmunology The Journal of Immunology · 2018
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Transformed cell-specific induction of apoptosis by porcine circovirus type 1 viral protein 3
First authorVirology Journal of General Virology · 2015
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Bcl-6 directly represses the gene program of the glycolysis pathway
Co-authorImmunometabolism Nature Immunology · 2014
Backed by a real engineering team
In 2025, Cytogence merged into KeyQ, Inc. as its Bioinformatics Division. The two shared a backbone — cloud infrastructure and serious software engineering — so consolidating meant Cytogence's scientific work is now built on production-grade engineering, not one-off scripts.
The result is a simple division of labor: analysis is led by a published scientist, and the software behind it is built by an engineering team. Tools like Cytogence FCS, Atlas, and the free PrimerGenie all came out of real research problems we hit ourselves.
What you actually get
Biology and computation
Someone who has been the person at the bench and the person writing the pipeline. We understand the experiment behind the data, not just the file format.
Reproducible by default
Production-grade pipelines with full provenance — every figure traceable to its data, parameters, and code version. Built to survive reviewer #2.
Publication-ready
We meet you wherever your data is and take it all the way to figures, tables, and methods your reviewers and co-authors will trust.
Let's move your research forward
Tell us about your project and we'll work with you to design the right analysis approach. Run a core facility? We partner with facilities that need an analysis pressure-release valve.
Get in Touch