NEW YORK – Genialis said Thursday that it has reached a sponsored research agreement with BioLab, the bioinformatics laboratory at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, to create new algorithms and computing methods for choosing therapeutic options for patients based on their disease subtype.
"PubMed includes nearly 1 million biomarker studies, but vanishingly few have seen success in the clinic being used to help actual patients," Genialis CTO Miha Stajdohar said in a statement. "Using our experience as a baseline, we have identified key shortcomings common to the old way of doing things and have invented technologies to better identify omics signatures and build predictive models to help patients most in need of precision medicines."
BioLab Director Blaz Zupan noted that his laboratory specializes in matching molecular and clinical data with existing knowledgebases, as well as in data visualization and artificial intelligence. "In collaborating with Genialis, we have the opportunity to really advance the application of data science to drug development," Zupan said.
Boston-based Genialis already has integrated its Expressions machine learning-based multiomics analysis software with Orange, an open-source data mining and visualization technology developed at BioLab, and the two organizations have longstanding relationships.
Stajdohar earned his PhD in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana, where he studied under Zupan. Genialis maintains an office in Ljubljana, and Zupan is a senior advisor to the company.