Asterand seals deal with BioWisdom on gene expression profiles

Partnership

Asterand plc, which provides human tissue and related services to pharmaceutical companies for use in drug discovery, reached an agreement with the bioinformatics company BioWisdom Ltd, to integrate Asterand’s human gene expression profiles with BioWisdom’s business intelligence software. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

BioWisdom gains access to Asterand’s proprietary Target Evaluator database, which consists of quantitative human gene expression profiles charting the expression of more than 2,500 commercially relevant gene transcripts across a panel of 72 human tissues. BioWisdom will harmonise this data with its software, enabling the information to be combined with other public and private sources.

Martyn Coombs, Chief Executive Officer of Asterand, said, “We are pleased to enter this partnership to further commercialise the Target Evaluator database. BioWisdom is a market leader in the integration and syndication of medical intelligence. The combination of Asterand's human gene expression profile data with BioWisdom’s ontology software solutions will be a powerful tool in the discovery of new pathway specific therapeutic strategies, biomarker applications and potential side-effect liabilities for drug candidates that interact with specific targets.”

Gordon Smith Baxter, Chief Executive Officer of BioWisdom, said, “This partnership is the first of many we plan to secure with providers of high quality premium data. Data on its own can provide value, but it is in the context of other data that it really begins to enlighten.  Our ontological approach is perfectly suited to the task of integrating diverse data sets and we are delighted with the opportunity that this relationship provides.”