Accelerating the drug discovery process

To help discover, analyze and share scientific information, Laboratoires Fournier is deploying a text analytics solution. The French affiliate of Solvay Pharmaceuticals will use TEMIS' Luxid for Life Sciences software in its attempt to meet medical needs in several therapeutic areas.

Sébastien Vachenc, bioinformatician at Laboratoires Fournier’s Exploratory Biology Unit (EBU) Department, says, "We decided to implement the solution 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, 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."

The text analytics solution is intended to accelerate the identification of biomarkers by enabling targeted and efficient knowledge extraction from the growing volume of biomedical literature, TEMIS reports in a recent press release.

In 2005, Laboratoires Fournier and TEMIS embarked on a pilot project that led to adoption of the technology in various studies. Now, Laboratoires Fournier wants to apply the text analytics solution to highlight a selection of potential biomarker candidates before the pre-clinical studies. The Biological and Medical Skill Cartridges are used for the biomarkers project to detect specific relationships between diseases and proteins.