Elsevier said this week that it has acquired the business assets of Ariadne Genomics for an undisclosed sum.
Under its new ownership, the Rockville, Md.-based pathway analysis firm will be integrated with Elsevier's corporate markets division, the publishing firm said.
Alexander van Boetzelaer, Elsevier's managing director of corporate markets, said that Ariadne's product portfolio provides "a powerful complement" to his firm's existing "chemistry, pre-clinical and clinical workflow solutions."
Earlier this year, Elsevier launched Genome Viewer, a browser it developed with the National Center for Biotechnology Information that displays information from GenBank within journal articles (BI 8/5/2011).
Ariadne's pathway analysis tools and semantic technologies "integrate research findings from across multiple content sources providing a deeper understanding of biological pathways and disease progression," he said in a statement. As such, they "improve research productivity and outcomes for life science researchers by delivering new insights for potential interventions, therapies and cures.”
Furthermore, the purchase adds "a passionate and dedicated team of life science professionals" to Elsevier's roster, van Boetzelaer said.
Ilya Mazo, Ariadne’s CEO, said the combined firms will focus on "strengthening our ability to serve biological researchers in scientific communities."
These plans include "further development of Pathway Studio, fortified with Elsevier’s content,” he said in a statement.
Elsevier is the third scientific publishing firm in the last year to make a play for the life science software market.
Last December, Nature's parent company, Macmillan Publishers, launched a new business called Digital Science to provide software tools and services and disclosed that three firms — SureChem, BioData, and Symplectic — will contribute resources to its business (BI 12/10/2010).
A few weeks prior, Thomson Reuters announced that it had acquired privately held pathway informatics firm GeneGo to complement its existing life science products and provide its clients with a better understanding of the underlying mechanism of disease and potential therapies (BI 12/3/2010).