In the hope that Medline searches are indeed on the verge of becoming a standard component of the bioinformatics toolkit, InPharmix said that it plans to incorporate its StAT (Statistical Analysis of Text) software for searching Medline into BioWisdom’s Discovery Portfolio web portal.
Discovery Portfolio is a customizable drug discovery target tracking system that automatically alerts users to changes in public and proprietary information. While StAT is currently available free of charge on InPharmix’s website, its additional availability through Discovery Portfolio will allow users to customize and save search terms so that searches can be performed regularly and automatically.
“It will be linked to a user’s portfolio so you’ll be able to run updated searches daily or weekly or whatever, whereas through our website you’d have to re-enter the query every time you wanted to run a search,” said James Sluka, chief scientist at InPharmix.
StAT analyzes Medline using a combination of statistics and heuristics to rank sentences, words, and abstracts. It first ranks words according to frequency, and then applies a heuristic that scores certain words that indicate specific functions – such as “agonist,” “antagonist,” “binds,” or “inhibits” – even higher. It calculates a score based on every word, sentence, and abstract and ranks the findings accordingly.
Discovery Portfolio users will be able to link back to the original Medline records through the StAT tool.
InPharmix is planning on offering several software tools that are still in development through Discovery Portfolio in the future.
— BT