Selventa and Linguamatics Announce Strategic Partnership to Provide a Complete Pipeline of Scientific Knowledge Extraction to th

Collaboration to Accelerate Scientific Knowledge Augmentation through Natural Language Processing Based Text Mining Solutions

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - October 31, 2011 - SelventaTM, a personalized healthcare company focused on stratification of patients and development of predictive biomarker panels based on disease-driving mechanisms, today announced that it has formed a strategic scientific alliance with Linguamatics (www.linguamatics.com), a software solutions company that provides knowledge extraction through its innovative I2E natural language processing (NLP) text mining platform. The alliance will bring together established analytical capabilities of both companies to efficiently extract complex life science knowledge in a computable, structured, biological expression language (BEL) format that can be used to interpret large-scale experimental data in the context of published literature.

"The Selventa and Linguamatics collaboration shows how precise, detailed information can be automatically extracted from the literature and provided in a format suitable for further analysis and reasoning," said David Milward, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer at Linguamatics. "This will allow re-use of knowledge from the literature, at greater scale and speed."

 

Selventa's discovery platform operates on top of a collection of scientific knowledge (knowledgebase) comprised of a set of BEL statements. BEL is a structured language designed to represent scientific findings in a computable form with supporting contextual information (e.g. tissue, disease, species, publication, etc.). BEL is use-neutral, articulating an idea in a manner that is unambiguous, terse, and conveys the facts and associated contexts without loss or ambiguity. BEL, along with the BEL Framework, is available through a portal to the scientific community to promote the collection, sharing and interchange of structured scientific knowledge (www. belframework.org).

 

Compared to a manual process of translating biological facts from the literature into BEL, Linguamatics' I2E platform contains powerful NLP-based capabilities that efficiently identify and extract relationships hidden in unstructured text, to generate structured scientific knowledge that can subsequently be used for comprehensive biological investigation and analysis. It offers dramatically increased speed, scale and reproducibility, and the possibility to efficiently go back into a textual data source to pull out additional information that has become relevant.

 

"This partnership is a great strategic fit to facilitate the representation of complex biological knowledge that can be recycled and maximized through our analytical platform," said David de Graaf, Ph.D., President and CEO of Selventa. "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. 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."

 

 

About Linguamatics

Linguamatics enables organizations to maximize the value derived from information resources through effective deployment of innovative natural language processing (NLP) based technology. The versatile semantic knowledge discovery system, I2E, helps organizations to do much more than simply cope with vast quantities of information. Its unique combination of search and text mining enables organizations to turn this information into a competitive advantage. From life sciences and healthcare to business intelligence, from media analysis to security, users mine large collections of documents, extracting, analyzing and synthesizing relevant facts, relationships and quantitative data from content such as scientific papers, news feeds, patents, or internal reports. Linguamatics has a rapidly growing user community with I2E deployed in the top ten global pharmaceutical companies. The company was founded in 2001, and is headquartered in Cambridge, UK. For more information, visit www.linguamatics.com.

 

About Selventa

Founded in 2002 and privately-held, Selventa helps clients find optimal treatments for the right patients by offering scientific consulting services, software and strategic partnerships. The company analyzes molecular patient data, accelerates the development process and clarifies therapeutics and diagnostics decisions. Selventa engages in short-, mid- and long-term relationships with top-tier pharmaceutical and life science companies to develop new therapeutics and mechanistic biomarkers in the areas of oncology, metabolic disorders, cardiovascular diseases, inflammation and drug safety. For more information, visit www.selventa.com.

 

 

For more information, please contact:

Diane H. Song, Ph.D., 617-547-5421 x235

[email protected]