National Institute of Health Awards Insightful Corporation Grant Worth Nearly $750,000
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Insightful Corporation (NASDAQ:IFUL), a leading provider of predictive analytics and reporting solutions, announced today that the National Institute of Health (NIH) has awarded Insightful a grant of $749,592 to conduct a two-year Phase II SBIR research and development project on least angle regression (LARS). This project calls for Insightful to develop an easy-to-use and flexible LARS solution that may be used for medical diagnosis, detection of cancer, feature selection in microarrays, and modeling patient characteristics like blood pressure. The NIH has funded this project under grant number 2R44GM074313-02.
“Researchers and academics believe that LARS has great potential, but up till now the academic software available has been limited in scope and refinement,” said Dr. Jill R. Goldschneider, director of research at Insightful. “We are excited by this opportunity granted by the NIH to develop robust and easy-to-use LARS software that will enable medical researchers to obtain high prediction accuracy and to obtain stable and interpretable results in high-dimensional situations.”
The Phase II research and development project follows an earlier Phase I research and development project for the NIH. Phase I work demonstrated feasibility by extending least angle regression work in three key directions: categorical predictors, logistics regression and a numerically accurate implementation. The outcome of Phase I was an open-source prototype library for generalized least angle regression called GLARS (available for download at http://csan.insightful.com/) for S-PLUS® and R, including contributions from outside researchers.
Led by Dr. Tim Hesterberg, senior research scientist at Insightful, the LARS team plans to produce superior methods and software for classification and regression when there are many potential predictor variables to choose from. The goals for Phase II include extensions to other types of explanatory variables (e.g. polynomial or spline functions and interactions between variables), to survival and other additional regression models, and to handle missing data and massive data sets.
“We’re excited about working in the open-source environment,” said Hesterberg. “Contributions from outside researchers have long been a major advantage of S-PLUS. Open-source work allows us to harness the explosion of academic work and provides an agility that can’t be matched by traditional statistics packages.”
Funding from the award will be recorded in the company’s financial statements as a reduction to research and development expense.
ABOUT INSIGHTFUL
Insightful Corporation (NASDAQ:IFUL) is a provider of predictive analytics and reporting solutions. Insightful products S-PLUS®, Insightful Miner™, S-PLUS® Server and InFact® provide companies with the knowledge to act™. Insightful consulting services provide specialized expertise and proven processes for the design, development and deployment of customized solutions. The company has been delivering industry-leading, high-ROI solutions to thousands of companies in financial services, life sciences, biotechnology, telecommunications, and manufacturing, plus government and research institutions, for more than 18 years. Headquartered in Seattle, Insightful has offices in North Carolina, France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, with distributors around the world. For more information, visit www.insightful.com, email info@insightful.com or call 1-800-569-0123.
