Merck & Co. Licenses Ariadne Genomics' MedScan™ Text-to-Knowledge Suite

Ariadne Genomics, Inc. has announced that it has granted Merck & Co., Inc. of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, a corporate-wide license for MedScan™ Text-to-Knowledge Suite software, Ariadne's automated scientific text processing tool.

MedScan extracts information from text using natural language processing (NLP) technology and converts scientific text into a database of protein functional relationships.

"Merck recognizes the need for integrated databases of systems biology and pathway data to feed and support its R&D pipeline," said Nikolai Daraselia, Director of Research at Ariadne Genomics.

"MedScan generates an interconnected network of functional relationships between proteins, cell processes etc., with references to the original documents."

"Instant availability of documents and data for computational analysis and the ability to process new content in real time can make a significant difference in the speed and efficiency of today's pharmaceutical research."

Ariadne claims that, MedScan Text-to-Knowledge Suite software automatically extracts pathway- related information from text.

Data regarding regulation, expression regulation, binding, molecular transport, protein modification, molecular synthesis etc. are recognized in the text and stored in XML files.

MedScan can be easily integrated with corporate bioinformatics tools for further analysis of the extracted information, customized to extract new types of information, and formatted as an automatic text processing pipeline for regularly updated text sources.