Sophic Continues Gene Curation Project with NCI, Lands Syngenta Deal with IBM

NEW YORK, Nov. 30 (GenomeWeb News) - Sophic Systems Alliance will analyze Medline as part of its cancer gene-curation project for the National Cancer Institute, the company said today.

As part of the multi-year project, Sophic will text-mine Medline abstracts and manually annotate and validate results to identify all cancer genes, gene-disease relationships, and cancer gene-compound relationships.

This is the second such project signed with NCI, Sophic said.

Medline abstracts include over 8 million papers published since 1972 when the first oncogene was identified. Over 8,000 suspect genes were found in the pilot study, which was completed last year, of which 4,500 cancer genes were validated and identified.

NCI expects to make the cancer genes publicly available every six months, Sophic said.

The entire curation of the 4,500 cancer genes is expected to be completed in 2006.

In a separate announcement, the company said it signed a multi-year agreement with Syngenta Biotechnology to provide a global data-integration system.

The agreement partners Sophic with IBM to roll out the combined BioRS and WebSphere Information Integrator solution globally over the next six months, said John Chan, Syngenta's head of Global Bioinformatics, in a statement.