CollabRx, Inc, a data analytics company focused on informing clinical decision making in molecular medicine, and OncoDNA, SA, a Belgium company that provides DNA next generation sequencing (NGS) tests for clinical use in cancer, today announced a multi-year agreement to purchase CollabRx SaaS-based technology and content resources to be used in conjunction with OncoDNA’s cancer mutation panels. Read more

Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics recently wrote, “The best thing about the Big Data hype in pharma is how effectively it’s shed light on all of the Small Data problems the industry is facing. The roots of the Big Data movement in pharma were innocent enough: challenges in storage, data access, and data analytics that organizations started seeing with shifts toward high-throughput screening and massive genomics data sets. But as Big Data became more and more mainstream, the range of business challenges that got slapped with the “Big Data” label started ranging further and further afield. Industry analysts noticed this quickly, redefining Big Data in terms of the three (or four) Vs–not just volume but also variety, velocity, and variability. Others have been quick to follow. At a recent conference on data-driven drug development, speaker after speaker stood up to talk about their approach to Big Data, and each speaker immediately qualified that they were speaking about the variety of data, rather than the volume of data.” Read more

Anna Leach of the Wall Street Journal reports, “New scientific research must be published for free online, the vice-president of the European Commission said, in a move designed to increase the knowledge pool open to small business and lead to more innovative products. All scientists receiving European Union funding will have to publish their results in an open-access format, Neelie Kroes, the commissioner responsible for Europe’s digital agenda, said Monday in Stockholm.  Ms. Kroes also  launched the global Research Data Alliance — a group committed to pooling and co-ordinating scientific data so it can be shared better.”

Leach continues, “Opening up scientific research is good for small business, said Victor Henning, CEO of British startup Mendeley, which aims to make academic research more connected. He has noticed the demand for access to academic research from small businesses. Read more

With over 30 million worldwide blog sites analyzed, the study provides fascinating insights into emotions by stage of cancer and emotions surrounding key drugs prescribed in head and neck, ovarian, breast, lung, colorectal, hepatocellular and renal cancers. It also identifies key opinion leaders(KOP’s) and influencers across the blogosphere.

In addition, the study has classified every Oncology drug mentioned across the blogosphere for its intensity of mention by category of disease. Key metrics such as emotions over time for competitive oncology drugs, emotions around treatment type (medication, radiation, surgery, etc.) as well as cohorts of physicians, patients, nurses and caregivers were analyzed. BehaviorMatrix presented findings around one of the disease categories studied, breast cancer, at the ePharma Summit. Read more

Certify Data Systems, Inc., a pioneer of rapidly deployable and scalable Heath Information Exchange (HIE) systems, today announced that its enterprise HIE platform, HealthLogix ™, passed numerous Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile tests at the 2013 IHE North America Connectathon, held January 28 – February 2 inChicago, Ill. The company is a subsidiary of Humana Inc., one of the nation’s leading health and well-being companies. Read more

InterSystems Corporation, a global leader in software for connected care, announced that Massachusetts-based Baycare Health Partners and Baystate Health have selected InterSystems HealthShare® as their strategic informatics platform for an innovative, new regional health information exchange (HIE). Baycare Health Partners and Baystate Health have spearheaded the formation of the Pioneer Valley Health Information Exchange, or PVIX, which will rely on HealthShare to provide a “one patient, one record” view across hospitals, medical practices, health insurance payers, laboratories, and other healthcare institutions participating in Baycare’s Pioneer Valley Accountable Care organization (PVAC) and across the western Massachusetts region. PVIX will also serve as an onramp for the region to the Massachusetts statewide health information exchange. Read more

Matthew Weingarten of MMM-Online.com reports, “By applying a scientific approach, and taking advantage of technology that’s available, pharmaceutical marketers can boost the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and improve the return on their investment. Evidence-based approach shouldn’t be confined to the lab. Two current trends  push us toward enhanced rigor in marketing. First, the Internet has globalized the medical profession. Easily accessible medical databases put the latest research into the hands of doctors everywhere. As the profession has embraced social media, the network of influence has been completely remapped. The power of opinion leaders is now felt worldwide, through multiple channels.” Read more

Healthline Networks and Visual Health Solutions and Denver’s leading healthcare system, HealthONE, today announced a partnership to provide patients and physicians with Healthline’s BodyMaps application via the HealthONE website, www.HealthONEcares.com.

BodyMaps demystifies complex aspects of health by combining Healthline’s unique semantic taxonomy and Visible Health Solution’s high-quality anatomical content into a unique interactive 3D experience for users to visually explore the human body, from its largest organ to its smallest bone. BodyMaps also maps thousands of anatomical and clinical terms to simple patient-friendly synonyms, making it understandable to anyone. Read more

According to a recent article out of the company, “InteliChart, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based, vendor-neutral technologies that facilitate healthcare information exchange, has selected Clinical Architecture’s Symedical® Server for semantic interoperability and comprehensive terminology management for its suite of health information exchange solutions. InteliChart will use the solution to improve the way it represents, stores, processes and shares clinical and administrative data with different systems, which will result in the exchange of more meaningful data.” Read more

Image Courtesy: ipharmd.net

Dr. Carlo Trugenberger, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at InfoCodex Semantic Technologies AG, has co-authored a report reflecting the topic he discussed at last fall’s London SemTech event: An approach to drug research that relies on identifying relevant biochemical information using the company’s autonomous self-organizing semantic engines to text mine large repositories of biomedical research papers.

The model, says Trugenberger, is a departure from many other semantically-engineered approaches to streamlining drug research, which are based on natural language processing (NLP). That’s good for extracting information from documents, he says, but not as adept at discovering knowledge. “That’s what our InfoCodex software is designed for, to find new facts and hidden correlations” in repositories of unstructured information.

Read more