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

16 March 05

University of Edinburgh and Cognia to develop powerful new tools to extract key information from the growing mountain of life sciences data.

ITI Life Sciences has launched 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.

Scottish Development International (SDI), together with Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh and Lothian (SEEL), have helped facilitate Cognia’s smooth transition to establish a company base in Scotland and will continue to support the company’s growth.

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.

Efficiencies achieved by accessing life science information in database form could help drive down the cost of drug development significantly, and will bring benefits to over 190,000 R&D information users at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in the US, Japan and Europe alone.

Dr John Chiplin, CEO of ITI Life Sciences, commented, "Text mining is set to play an increasingly important role in all areas of science and technology in the future. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the life sciences where a massive and ever expanding body of scientific research work offers the potential to uncover hidden pearls of information currently lost in an ocean of words. In commercial terms, sophisticated text mining approaches will enable the world’s pharmaceutical and life sciences communities to pursue new avenues of research and ultimately improve the efficiency of the drug discovery process. For Scotland, this represents a great opportunity to maximise its existing expertise in this area and to create a commercially successful technology that can be applied not just across life sciences but much more widely."

Ewan Klein, Professor of Language Technology at the University of Edinburgh, said, "This exciting new programme offers unique opportunities to us as researchers and as engineers. It will allow us to extend our current language technology in novel directions, to work in close cooperation with biologists and software engineers in Cognia, and to scale up our research software to address the practical needs of an important community of users. The University of Edinburgh offers an amazingly rich and diverse research environment, not least in the areas of natural language processing, bioinformatics and e-Science, and we are delighted to see the commercial development of the results of our academic work for the long-term benefit of Scotland."

"We will be expanding into Europe with the right set of partners," noted David M. Rubin, Ph.D., CEO of Cognia Corporation. "The ITI Life Sciences team has mapped out a research programme in an area with a huge unmet need. Cognia and world class researchers at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics are a perfect match to develop and commercialise a solution. We could not be more pleased."

Welcoming the announcement, Deputy First Minister Jim Wallace said, "This is another fine example of Scottish strengths working for Scotland's benefit. Not only is ITI Life Sciences cementing its role in bringing together renowned academic and business expertise in a field of enormous economic potential, it has been able to do so by drawing on opportunities uncovered by SDI and a coherent support package offered by SEEL. I am delighted that this collective effort has resulted in a programme of this calibre; successful text mining holds huge promise - both within life sciences and beyond. Pro-actively positioning ourselves at the forefront of this emerging market is certainly where we want to be. I applaud all involved in this programme for helping take us there."