NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The life sciences software company Sophic said today it will use $1.3 million from the National Cancer Institute over one year to complete an index of a total of 6,610 cancer-related genes that are found in Medline abstracts.
Sophic said it built the standardized and curated cancer database over the past four years through a collaboration with NCI and with the German company Biomax Informatics. The collaboration has already resulted in a compendium of 4,658 annotated cancer genes that are now available through the NCI’s website, the company said.
"This knowledge base is the foundation for reliable, accurate cancer research for all types of cancer diseases, clinical trials, biomarkers and much more,” said Sophic CEO Pat Blake.
Biomax CEO Kleus Heumann said the collaborators used a “factory assembly line" approach “that allows the automated text mining results to be fed to the scientific team who curate and annotate the information in an efficient, quality-controlled, work-flow process.”