Linguamatics To Aid AstraZeneca's Drug Discovery And Development Efforts

Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Article Date: 19 Dec 2005 - 16:00 PDT

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Linguamatics, a leading player in Natural Language Processing (NLP), announced today that AstraZeneca PLC has extended its license agreement for continued access to an Intelligence Network-based text mining solution for the analysis of research and other literature provided by Linguamatics in combination with the Intelligence Network expert, BioWisdom Ltd.

The original user license was signed in October 2003. AstraZeneca uses this technology for its drug discovery and development programmes; the technology facilitates and enables the discovery of new and relevant information from large collections of text documents that would otherwise be impossible or unfeasibly time-consuming to do using conventional methods. No financial details of the deal were disclosed.

Roger Hale, COO of Linguamatics, said, "We have had a strong response to our technology throughout the pharmaceutical industry, and are naturally very pleased that companies such as AstraZeneca are achieving success with our system in drug discovery and development applications. We are delighted to be building on our relationships with AstraZeneca and BioWisdom."

Adriano Henney, Director of Pathways at AstraZeneca, said, "The combined power of both Linguamatics' and BioWisdom's technology has made a significant difference to our ability to extract specific information from current literature. We increasingly rely on this advanced technology as part of the support we give to drug discovery and development projects, and are pleased to continue our collaboration."

Linguamatics provides an interactive text mining system, I2E. The combination of this linguistic analytical tool with BioWisdom's Intelligence Network provides substantially enhanced search performance over other text mining approaches.

ABOUT LINGUAMATICS LTD

Linguamatics Ltd, headquartered in Cambridge UK, and established in 2001, is at the forefront of natural language processing (NLP), specialising in NLP- and ontology-based systems for processing text and speech. Linguamatics produces versatile and powerful text mining tools which can be customized using domain specific knowledge such as ontologies, and is the first company to develop an interactive information extraction system (I2E). Application areas in the pharmaceutical industry include pathway discovery from biological literature, drug safety and business intelligence.

ABOUT BIOWISDOM LTD

BioWisdom Ltd., headquartered in Cambridge UK, and established in September 2000, builds Intelligence Networks which are used to support decision making in critical issues in all areas of the healthcare industry from early stage drug discovery and clinical development through to market profiling and due diligence on new products. The BioWisdom team combines extensive experience of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries with proven expertise in life science software development. BioWisdom's customers include Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca.

ABOUT astrazeneca plc

AstraZeneca is a major international healthcare business engaged in the research, development, manufacture and marketing of prescription pharmaceuticals and the supply of healthcare services. It is one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies with healthcare sales of over $21.4 billion and leading positions in sales of gastrointestinal, oncology, cardiovascular, neuroscience and respiratory products. AstraZeneca is listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (Global and European) as well as the FTSE4Good Index.

Linguamatics Ltd
Roger Hale, COO
Phil Hastings, Business Development Director
Tel: +44 (0)1223 421360
info@linguamatics.com
http://www.linguamatics.com

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