Murex licenses Ariadne's drug R&D software solution
which is to play a vital role in the visualisation and analysis of
biological pathways and gene regulation networks for cancer
therapeutics development.
The agreement taps into the time consuming and costly process headaches that are associated with drug discovery. In addition, the emerging trend to use in silico computational chemistry and molecular modelling for computer-aided drug design has gained significant momentum.
Ariadne Genomics' software Pathway Studio, (formerly known as PathwayAssist) enables life scientists to identify relationships among proteins, small molecules, cell processes and treatments, and automatically extract relevant biological interactions from scientific literature.
Murex, a biotechnology company based in the US, will use Pathway Studio to develop computer-based models for the identification and validation of cancer targets.
"It's hard to overestimate the importance of Pathway Studio in our development of cancer therapies based on patients' individual gene expression data," commented David Shanahan, President and CEO of Murex Pharmaceuticals.
"Pathway Studio will accelerate our development efforts as well as help to further increase the safety of our products."
Increasing access to high throughput data plus rapidly developing theory behind pathways, systems biology, life scientists need tools to make data, keep track of it and run it in models.
With the product's resident ResNet database of over 1,000,000 interactions extracted from PubMed and approximately 1000 predefined pathways, researchers can reconstruct regulatory networks from their microarray and proteomics data, identify biomarkers, and model drug responses.
"The software keeps the on-board ResNet database up-to-date," said Ilya Mazo, President of Ariadne.
"It automatically extracting relevant biological interactions from literature, while the flexible user interface allows database queries to expand known pathways and build regulatory networks focused on specific research tasks, such as drug target or biomarker discovery."
