NEW YORK, May 30 - Blueprint Worldwide, a new not-for-profit organization established with support from IBM, MDS Proteomics, and the Canadian government, has taken over the administration of BIND, a free database of protein sequence and interaction data, IBM and MDS Proteomics said Wednesday.
For the last several months, BIND has been freely available from its temporary home at the Center for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT), an affiliate of the University of British Columbia.
But over the next few years, a team of curators at Blueprint will add protein data from at least 200,000 published scientific papers, said Blueprint managing director Francis Ouellette, a bioinformaticist at CMMT.
The architecture for BIND, a database of protein sequence, signal transduction, and protein-protein interaction information, was initially developed by Chris Hogue and other academics at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Hogue currently serves as chief information officer at MDS Proteomics.
Blueprint is the product of an MDS Proteomics collaboration with IBM, announced in late January. To scale up the database, IBM donated computing power and database software, and MDS provided bioinformatics expertise. The companies contributed a total of $9 million Canadian dollars ($5.8 million) to the project.
In the future, Ouellette said Blueprint will solicit further funding from Canadian government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and industrial partners.
As a public resource, BIND is freely available to both commercial and academic users.
"Some might call it complementary" to protein databases developed by private companies, Ouellette said.