Thomson Reuters has built APIs to streamline access to its vast amounts of data on drug research and development and business intelligence for biopharma customers, the company said. And it turns out that the APIs--or application programming interfaces--were influenced by the information giant's work with biotech powerhouse Biogen Idec ($BIIB).
Cortellis for Informatics, Reuters' new platform, provides the APIs that other companies can use to bridge their organization's specific information needs with the data available from Thomson's troves of life sciences information, according to Thomson. For Biogen, which pays for access to the data, the APIs were necessary to connect its R&D and commercial groups to info from Cortellis without performing authorized "web scraping" to cull the desired data for its workforce, Bio-IT World reported.
"From the beginning we said [APIs] would be a lot easier," William Hayes, director of decision support at Biogen, told Bio-IT World. "But it takes time to build a decent API. … An API on top of content allows us to customize what we're pulling out and deliver internally [by email or RSS] bits of information someone can quickly review and decide if they want to follow up."
- see the release from Thomson Reuters
- read the article in Bio-IT World