ITI Life Sciences Launches £5.3 Million Text Mining R&D Programme

17-Mar-2005

ITI Life Sciences announced the launch of a new £5.3 million three-year R&D programme to develop advanced text mining technologies targeted at life sciences applications, and to create commercial success through a Scottish centre of excellence in this exciting new discipline.

Text mining is the process of analysing large quantities of text to identify and extract valuable information. This ITI Life Sciences programme aims to address the difficulty life sciences researchers have in extracting and interpreting relevant information from the massive and rapidly increasing volume of published literature. While initially developed for the life sciences market, this platform technology can be developed and commercialised for use in other market sectors.

The aims will be achieved through the construction of a powerful software system that will enable the rapid creation of databases of key information hidden in the scientific and medical literature. Use of such databases is expected to lead to faster and less expensive drug discovery and development.

The programme, which will be conducted in Edinburgh, brings together Cognia EU Ltd, a new subsidiary of US-based biological and chemical information management company Cognia, and the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics.

Cognia is establishing its European headquarters in Edinburgh and is recruiting key personnel and expertise locally to do much of the work in application design, software development, biology specific work and database development. Cognia will provide an accelerated commercialisation route to market through its established distribution channels to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and academic research organisations.

The University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics contributes world-leading expertise to the programme and will lead the development of novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques that will help biologists identify and extract critical information from the online biomedical literature. NLP allows computers to detect meaningful patterns in huge bodies of written text, and plays a central role in text mining. This ITI programme provides an unrivalled opportunity to commercialise informatics research through a Scottish-based company with well-established channels to the global market.

According to ITI Life Sciences' Markets and Technology analysis, the market for advanced text mining and related technologies is emerging, currently growing at 10%, and is set to accelerate. Based on current spending analysis within the pharmaceutical industry, the life science text mining market is estimated to be worth £200m in 2014.

https://www.bionity.com/en/news/44426/iti-life-sciences-launches-5-3-million-text-mining-r-d-programme.html