lar scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing industry publishing over half-a-million articles every year and growing.

ExerGen Bioscience’s mission is to help the scientist man-age that risk and stay on top of what is knownand relevant to that scientist in a way that current Internet search tech­nology cannot. Unlike Google and the other traditional internet search engines, which search based on keyword, ExerGen Bioscience’s ability to search based on relation-ship is the critical enabler to meet this rapidly growing market need.

Currently, a $650million industry has developed wherebyhighly trained domain expertsmanually ‘curate’ the scien­tific literature by abstracting and synthesizing information of potential relevance and placing it manually in relational databases. This process is expensive and time-consuming, and results are subject to human limits and variability, and are immediately out of date as new publications appear daily.

Technology

ExerGen’s patented technology, the GeneWays DiscoveryPlatform^™, uses natural language processing (NLP) technol­ogy to ‘read’ and understand the sentences in a scientific article. In its current version, it automatically extracts state­ments about biomolecular interactions and places them in adatabase, BioLit Knowledge Bank^™. Its ability to extract rela­tionships will be enhanced over the next three years to include ADME, toxicology, clinical trials data, therapeutics, as well as diagnostic and patient records.

BioLit Knowledge Bank currently includes almost 1.5 mil-lion terms including genes, proteins, and cell processes.

 

These relationships can then be visualized graphically to represent signaling pathways and explored through the graphical user interface in a way not currently possible.

The development of a substantial portfolio of technologies from a leading US university (see Scientific American, May ‘05) serves as the fun­damental basis for ExerGen’s suite of products.

These technologies include four patent families, encompassing 19 distinct patent applications, filed in the US and foreign jurisdictions, and over 20 copyrighted software components.

Looking forward

ExerGen expects to have broad market appeal since pharmaceutical and biotechnology compa­nies will greatly benefit from this technology in all stages of discovery and development (drug target identification through to lead validation and optimization to drug response profiling and clinical diagnostics).

A successful pilot evaluation with a major phar­maceutical company has been conducted, and the company’s first commercial suite of products is planned for launch Q4 2005, targeting life science research and drug discovery scientists.

ExerGen Biosciences is part of a $1M + applied research program to further enhance its biomedical text mining technologies. The program is supported by a $525,000 award from the NYSTAR Technology Transfer Incentive Program and will focus on broadening domain applications of the NLP core technology, improving accuracy of extraction and analytic tools, and enhancing visualization tech­nologies, expanding ExerGen’s opportunities for growth and profitability.

ExerGen expects to begin generating revenues in Q4 2005, sustainable cash from operations within eighteen months, and to become profitable in 2007.

The current focus for the use of investment funds will be ensuring successful product launch and growth in line with the business plan.