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Ariadne Receives SBIR Phase I Grant from NIH

19 Mar 2007 - Ariadne announced receiving a $100,000 SBIR Phase I grant from the NIH, National Center for Research Resources towards the further development of MedScan technology. MedScan employs natural language processing (NLP) to extract biomedical information from scientific text into databases amenable for computational analysis. The grant will be used to expand the scope of MedScan beyond its traditional focus on pathway analysis.
 
MedScan utilizes a high content linguistics approach to extract functional relationships between biological entities such as proteins, cell processes and small molecules from MEDLINE abstracts and full text articles. It recognizes types of regulatory mechanisms involved, the effects of regulation, and can be customized to extract other types of information and focus on different organisms.
 
The SBIR grant will be used to expand MedScan into the area of toxicology, small molecule-enzyme interactions, and human metabolism. The resulting knowledge base will have immediate impact and offer a high value proposition for early IND rejection as well as in biomarker discovery.