Ariadne Genomics Wins $750,000 SBIR Grant for Development of Text Mining Software

11-10-2004: Rockville. Ariadne Genomics, Inc., a leading developer of systems biology tools, today announced that it has received a $750,000 Phase II SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) grant from the National Institutes of Health. The two-year grant will be used for development of new software products based on MedScan, its proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology.

The SBIR award was issued by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The new software will extend Ariadne Genomics' product line of pathway analysis and information extraction tools to a broad range of biological and medical scientists.

During Phase I, Ariadne Genomics enhanced MedScan, its proprietary text processing technology, and assembled ResNet - a comprehensive database of molecular interactions, cell signaling and gene regulation events. The database is available as a part of PathwayAssistTM pathway analysis software.

"The past decade of biomedical research produced overwhelming amounts of data in the form of peer-reviewed articles. Efficient access to these data has become a bottleneck in the research process," said Dr. Nikolai Daraselia, Director of Research at Ariadne Genomics. "This grant will support the development of easy to use desktop and client-server software, which will simplify the access to and the analysis of protein and cellular function information for bio-medical researchers."

The concept of new Ariadne Genomics software will be centered around identification of semantic links that describe functional relations (e.g., interaction, regulation, involvement in) among biological entities: cellular processes, cellular components, proteins, small molecules, diseases, functional groups etc. The product will be available as a desktop or client-server application, and will work with publicly available text sources, as well as with users' proprietary document collections.