Ariadne To Collaborate In 7.5m€ Neuromuscular Disease Consortium To Find Biomarkers
ROCKVILLE, MD, and NEWCASTLE, ENGLAND — July 1, 2010 — Ariadne announces a new collaboration with the BIO-NMD consortium led by Professor Alessandra Ferlini at the University of Ferrara, Italy. BIO-NMD is a three year EU-funded research project concentrating on the search for non-invasive biomarkers in people with Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies and Collagen VI myopathies. The consortium, along with leading European academic and industry partners will work to identify non-invasive biomarkers for monitoring neuromuscular diseases (NMDs). Utilizing a myriad of OMIC sciences (genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic) and bioinformatics, the consortium hopes to bring qualified biomarkers for ongoing and further clinical trials.
Ariadne’s focus will be on providing bioinformatics tools for identifying functional pathways, potential targets and data outflow integration. The team will use its software, Pathway Studio®, as a core to integrate the data and information flow, in addition to using its expertise in information extraction to develop a literature-derived NMD biological knowledgebase of related processes and diseases. Specifically, Ariadne will build mechanistic models and pathways for NMD and interpret OMIC data generated by the consortium and partners in the context of NMD knowledgebase and networks.
BIO-NMD’s coordinator and chair of the steering committee, Professor Alessandra Ferlini (University of Ferrara, Italy) said, “The participation of Ariadne as partners together with INSERM is crucial for the project. Developing bioinformatic tools for OMIC studies analysis is essential and guarantees success to the project. In addition, it reinforces collaboration between academics and industries, again a key point for successful research to be translated into clinics”
“We have always worked to establish strong collaborations with our clients”, says Gabriella Armin, Director of Marketing for Ariadne. “Given the importance of this project, we are proud to not only provide the technology to enable this type of innovative discovery research, but contribute scientifically as team members. Our technological expertise in knowledge enrichment continues to provide crucial bioinformatics tools for visualizing the complexity found in biology.”
The first update workshops for the BIO-NMD consortium are to be held in July in London and will include sessions dedicated to its industrial partners. The consortium will present and describe the project impacts, possible outcomes and identify links for future collaborations with industry.
For further details about the project please visit the BIO-NMD website at www.bio-nmd.eu
About Ariadne
Ariadne (www.ariadnegenomics.com), a leader in research data products and knowledge enrichment-based software solutions, helps pharmaceutical and life science researchers tap known scientific knowledge for applications in systems biology and translational medicine. We provide a portfolio of solutions for life science, drug discovery and development applications including custom data products, knowledge extraction and visualization software, knowledge reports, and informatics staffing.
Pathway Studio, built and powered by MedScan® technology, is integrated data mining and visualization software that allows organizations and researchers to rapidly extract relevant facts and relationships from large document collections (text-mining), build focused knowledgebases (databases), while supporting the integration of OMICS experiments. The extracted knowledge is used in an interactive scaffold for defining and testing in silico-based hypotheses across a wide range of disciplines including mechanistic modeling of disease, drug action and toxicity, as well as biomarker discovery, cellular and network pathway building, protein-protein interactions and many more.
Pathway Studio is available in desktop and enterprise versions along with therapeutic-focused knowledgebases and cartridges. For more information, visit us at www.ariadnegenomics.com.
About BIO-NMD
BIO-NMD (www.bio-nmd.eu) is an EU-funded project devoted to the discovery and validation of biomarkers in muscle dystrophies with the aim of improving disease and therapy monitoring. It is a translational project which will focus on Duchenne and collagen VI myopathies.
The project is a consortium of 12 partner institutions led by the University of Ferrara’s Prof. Alessandra Ferlini and funded until Dec 2012
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