LIFE Biosystems links up with Fraunhofer

Collaboration and licence agreement

LIFE Biosystems GmbH and the Department of Bioinformatics at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI, Germany, are to collaborate on the identification and modelling of therapeutically relevant information from clinical/lexical data, with particular emphasis on drug mode of action and clinical outcomes.

As part of this agreement, LIFE – whose researchers are based in Heidelberg and at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, has licensed the Fraunhofer’s ProMiner entity recognition software. It says the software will become an integral part of the company’s text-mining infrastructure. In addition, both parties will work to collaboratively advance the development of information extraction algorithms in the clinical research domain.

“We have been extremely impressed by the advances made by SCAI in the field of biological information extraction,” said David Jackson, Director of in silico Discovery at LIFE Biosystems. “The synergies created as a result of this collaboration will enable us to efficiently bridge the gap between the clinical and molecular information domains. In so doing, we aim to achieve a new level of innovation in the analysis and application of patient derived data.”

“The collaboration with LIFE Biosystems fits perfectly with our overall strategy to further develop our text-mining technologies for application areas beyond biology,” said Juliane Fluck, Head of the Text Mining Group at Fraunhofer SCAI. “The domain of clinical information requires dedicated solutions for information extraction and the collaboration with LIFE Biosystems will help us to develop specialized ProMiner functionalities supporting mining in unstructured clinical data.”