TEMIS Text Analytics Solution to Support Laboratoires Fournier’s Drug Discovery Process

TEMIS, leading provider of Text Analytics software solutions for the Life Science industry announced today that they have entered in a strategic software and services agreement with Laboratoires Fournier, a French affiliate of Solvay Pharmaceuticals. Laboratoires Fournier have chosen TEMIS acclaimed Text Analytics solution to accelerate their drug discovery process.

Solvay Pharmaceuticals seeks to fulfil carefully selected, unmet medical needs in several therapeutic areas. As a strategic part of this group, Laboratoires Fournier’s Exploratory Biology Unit (EBU) takes part in this global goal by discovering substances which could be used as an indicator of a biological state and so-called biomarkers.

In order to accelerate its biomarkers identification, Laboratoires Fournier has chosen to strengthen its drug discovery process with Luxid^® for Life Sciences, the leading text analytics solution enabling targeted and efficient knowledge extraction from the ever-growing biomedical literature.

“At Solvay Pharmaceuticals, we decided to implement the Luxid^® for Life Sciences software in our drug discovery process in order to facilitate an up-to-date synthesis and sharing of scientific information extracted by means of three Skill Cartridges™ dedicated to relationships of biological, medical, and chemical entities, and we are currently working with TEMIS on the development of a specific Skill Cartridge™ for biomarkers discovery. We are convinced of the valuable contribution of this text mining approach to the search for validated and potential biomarkers”, said Sébastien Vachenc, Bioinformatician - EBU Department at Laboratoires Fournier.

Laboratoires Fournier and TEMIS started collaborating in September 2005. After a successful pilot project, several users adopted the technology and progressively applied it to various studies. Today Laboratoires Fournier wishes to continue applying Text Analytics to highlight a selection of potential biomarker candidates before the pre-clinical studies. For the Biomarkers project, the Biological and Medical Skill Cartridges™ are used to detect specific relationships between diseases and proteins.

“We at TEMIS are committed in the long term to serving the global needs of our valued customer Laboratoires Fournier”, said Guillaume Mazières, VP Sales and Marketing of TEMIS. “We provide them with highly innovative capabilities for analysis, interpretation and highlighting of results, allowing for a richer navigation experience and turning text into knowledge for every user.”