Selventa and Linguamatics team on mining details in journals


As drugmakers try to keep up with many key findings in scientific journals, personalized healthcare group Selventa and software firm Linguamatics have joined forces to streamline how important data from the literature are culled for further study, the companies announced last week.

Cambridge, MA-based Selventa (formerly Genstruct), which analyzes patient data for drug developers, brings to the alliance its expertise in a computable format for large-scale scientific data called biological expression language. For its part, Linguamatics, headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., is providing technology for I2E natural language processing, which will be used to corral important information from unstructured text much faster than any human could likely gather the information manually. Financial details of the companies' alliance weren't revealed.

Drug developers are faced with a growing body of scientific literature that offers potentially important information for their research. Scientists can spend hours poring over scientific texts or doing manual database searches to get to the findings they need for studies. Swiss drug giant Roche, for example, has provided its scientists with a tool called PubMed@Roche to map concepts rather than keywords in order to make its scientists' searches of PubMed efficient.

"Collaborating with Linguamatics will enable rapid yet comprehensive investigation of new areas of biology by extracting computable knowledge from unstructured text. This will lead to innovation on many fronts, such as next generation sequencing, where well-structured information for reasoning has been limited," David de Graaf, president and CEO of Selventa, said in a statement. "As a result, this will have the potential to provide a deeper, content-rich, scientific investigation to our partners, and ultimately help their future discovery efforts. We see a great potential for positive impact on future drug development decisions in areas such as translational medicine and clinical proof-of-concept stages."

- here's the release

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