Cognia to create operations and development center in Scotland.

EDINBURGH, Scotland—Cognia, a database specialist for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, has announced its plans to create a new operations center in Edinburgh. The new center will be responsible for commercializing and deploying text mining systems that help PhD-level curators analyze large quantities of scientific text to identify and extract valuable information. The company's 30-person development center already had been operating in Edinburgh since March 2005, and the expansion and addition of operations center staff is expected to more than triple that total.

"Cognia is extremely excited that we can place our entire development and operations centers in a single facility in Scotland," says Cognia CEO Robert Merold. "Scotland has a world-class work force and is a leader in both life science and natural language processing. The high caliber of technologists and scientists working in Scotland also allows Cognia to deliver our truly unique products to the market with the flexibility that the industry demands."

The company has also recently signed a commercial license agreement with Intermediary Technology Institute (ITI) Life Sciences in Scotland to develop in-license text mining intellectual property in a program with Cognia and Edinburgh University's School of Informatics. ITI Life Sciences is a publicly funded, commercially driven organization that funds and manages early-stage technology research and development programs in the life sciences arena.

"More effective and efficient drug discovery and development is based on speeding up the often complex research processes, including sorting through volumes of previous studies and results. Scotland's world renowned expertise in text mining and informatics will contribute significantly to the development of commercialized technologies in this field," notes Lorna Jack, president of the Americas for the organization Scottish Development International, which works to attract inward investment and knowledge to Scotland and helps Scottish companies do more business overseas. "The country's role as an innovator in the life sciences industry, along with its highly skilled work force, is a major attraction for leading companies, such as Cognia. Cognia's partnership with the University of Edinburgh and ITI Life Sciences has also enabled Scotland to further expand its life sciences capabilities, and we anticipate that this technology will soon be transferred to other sectors."