A transatlantic collaboration promises breakthroughs in drug discovery in the increasingly important area of personalised healthcare.

The technology will enable scientists to mine content-rich data out of a welter of information to improve decision making in translational medicine and clinical proof-of-concept research.

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

“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.”

Linguamatics is a software solutions specialist that provides knowledge extraction through its innovative I2E natural language processing (NLP) text mining platform.

Selventa is a personalised healthcare company focused on stratification of patients and development of predictive biomarker panels based on disease-driving mechanisms.

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 format that can be used to interpret large-scale experimental data in the context of published literature.

David Milward, CTO at Linguamatics said: “The collaboration shows how precise, detailed information can be automatically extracted from the literature and provided in a format suitable for further analysis and reasoning. This will allow re-use of knowledge from the literature, at greater scale and speed.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: David Milward