ROCKVILLE, Md.—Ariadne recently announced that it will market the products of Paris-based Aureus Pharma in the United States, and the two companies will cross-train on each others' technologies and enter into co-marketing and distribution arrangements as part of a broad collaboration that aims at integrating the sometimes disjointed knowledge management efforts among big pharmas and other drug development companies.
"This engagement highlights the ongoing evolution of Ariadne," says Dr. Ilya Mazo, the company's CEO. "By partnering with best-in-class providers of knowledge management solutions, we can provide solutions that enable customers to take advantage of both Ariadne's and Aureus' products where it makes sense in their organization, workflow and informatics infrastructure. We believe that this collaboration will make it possible to offer the highest level of interoperability between our companies, along with improved solutions for knowledge management."
Financial terms of the arrangement were not disclosed.
Although the two companies have not worked together before, Mazo notes that they currently share many of the same customers, but sell into different departments, a situation that, in his opinion, illustrates the lack of integration of knowledge management systems in all-too-many instances. The two companies hope to enhance the synergies between their respective knowledge management solutions, and more particularly, the interfaces between the protein pathway space and medicinal chemistry. Such interfaces will help customers better understand mechanisms of actions between therapeutic proteins, protein pathways and small molecules and provide new insights in the disease biology area.
"The partnership between Aureus and Ariadne will enable us to support synergies in discovery and development workflows as used across multiple departments and scientific disciplines in the life science industry," says Jason Theodosiou, CEO of Aureus Pharma. "Both companies are innovative and have created solutions that organize high-quality data from various sources to better identify, create, distribute and enable knowledge integration within an organization."
Via the collaboration, the two partners hope to establish confidence between researchers in disease biology and medicinal chemistry that the technologies they use and deploy in their specific environments provide continuity in the pipeline discovery process, align common goals in knowledge management and increase scientific comprehension between these two groups.
Ariadne designs and develops software and knowledge integration solutions for pharmaceutical and life science researchers. Its Pathway Studio software is an integrated database, supporting multiple 'omics profiling technologies, text mining and experimental data analysis tools that provide an interactive scaffold for defining and testing in silico-based hypotheses across a wide range of disciplines.
Pathway Studio includes a family of ResNet databases of biological relationships and curated pathways, both canonical and expert-driven. The databases are powered by MedScan technology, which researchers can use to edit and enhance database content from current literature, and by adding proprietary data, experimental data from multiple 'omics profiling technologies and biological relationships, creating a focused knowledgebase. A wide range of applications is supported, including mechanistic modeling of disease, drug action and toxicity, as well as biomarker discovery, cellular and network pathway building, and protein-protein interactions. Pathway Studio is available in desktop and enterprise versions.
Aureus Pharma provides a range of scientific knowledge solutions enabling biopharmaceutical companies to better understand the relationships of biological targets to compounds under evaluation. Aureus scientists monitor and organize the most relevant information from the scientific literature, including experimental in vitro and in vivo protocols. Headquartered in Paris, the company's information solutions aim to streamline the discovery process for biopharmaceutical companies and leading research institutions.
Ariadne and Quertle announce technology partnership
ROCKVILLE, Md.—Ariadne and Quertle announced June 2 a technology partnership to support new applications in biomedical text and knowledge search. Under the partnership agreement, Ariadne will provide technology and technical resources to Quertle and package Quertle's semantic search engine as an appliance solution for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries.
Quertle, a search engine for biomedical literature, uses semantic-driven text analytics to find conceptual relationships scattered throughout a document. The technology uses query terms and an innovative technology called Power Terms that represent entire classes of related concepts, such as "diseases." It can automatically identify key concepts and provide the user with the most relevant literature and an intuitive way to explore it.
The Quertle search engine will be enhanced by components of Ariadne's MedScan technology, a patent-pending series of algorithms that enable high-quality information and data retrieval from multiple sources of public information, text, journals and datasets. MedScan compiles the extracted data into biological relationships, which supports a wide range of biological applications, including Ariadne's Pathway Studio software product.
"Quertle is creating a paradigm-shift in the way researchers approach the literature," Ilya Mazo, CEO of Ariadne, said in a statement. "Rather than repackaging the same old methods, Quertle is the first biomedical search engine to focus on meaningful relationships. We are pleased to contribute to that revolution as well as have our own products benefit from their technologies."
