This story has been updated with a comment from IQvia.
ORLANDO, Florida (GenomeWeb) – Health analytics and contract research heavyweight IQvia has acquired bioinformatics company Linguamatics.
Linguamatics describes itself on its website and in other marketing material — including at its booth at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference here this week — as "an IQvia company."
An IQvia executive at HIMSS confirmed that the acquisition took place about a month ago, but declined to offer further details.
In a statement emailed to GenomeWeb, a different executive, Jon Resnick, president of real-world and analytics solutions at Durham, North Carolina-based IQvia, said that unstructured data is a "critical component" to IQvia's goal of helping life science companies derive value from artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.
"The addition of Linguamatics' AI-based natural language processing solution enhances our capabilities, which have already helped our life science and provider clients uncover insights to patient outcomes, make better decisions, and enhance value-based care. We are excited to continue to prove that AI/ML will ultimately advance healthcare," Resnick said.
IQvia, the product of the 2016 merger of Quintiles and IMS Health, is a major biopharmaceutical contract research organization as well as a large data-mining and clinical decision support firm. The company, which will report its 2018 financial results Thursday, had $9.74 billion in revenues for 2017.
Linguamatics, based in Cambridge, UK, makes a natural language processing platform called I2E that extracts information from unstructured text, as well as a scientific search engine called iScite. Its customer base includes pharmaceutical companies, the US Food and Drug Administration, hospitals, cancer institutes, and academic research centers.
Notably, Linguamatics is helping Sanofi sort through massive amounts of genomic data and published medical literature a quest to find new biomarkers for multiple sclerosis.