PARIS—TEMIS, a provider of text analytics software solutions for life sciences, recently announced a strategic software and services agreement with Laboratoires Fournier, a French affiliate of Solvay Pharmaceuticals, under which the organizataion chose the TEMIS Luxid for Life Sciences text analytics solution to accelerate their drug discovery process.

 

Solvay Pharmaceuticals seeks to fulfill carefully selected, unmet medical needs in several therapeutic areas. As a strategic part of this group, Laboratoires Fournier's Exploratory Biology Unit (EBU) takes part in this global goal by discovering substances which could be used as an indicator of a biological state and so-called biomarkers. In order to accelerate its biomarkers identification.

 

"[We] decided to implement the Luxid for Life Sciences software in our drug discovery process in order to facilitate an up-to-date synthesis and sharing of scientific information extracted by means of three Skill Cartridges dedicated to relationships of biological, medical and chemical entities," says Sébastien Vachenc, bioinformatician for EBU, "and we are currently working with TEMIS on the development of a specific Skill Cartridge for biomarkers discovery. We are convinced of the valuable contribution of this text mining approach to the search for validated and potential biomarkers."

Laboratoires Fournier and TEMIS started collaborating in September 2005. After a successful pilot project, several users adopted the technology and progressively applied it to various studies.