NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - Health Discovery Corporation said today that Epigenomics has taken a non-exclusive worldwide license to its support vector machine technology for use in DNA methylation analysis.
HDC’s SVM technology is a machine-learning approach for classifying high-dimensional data. Epigenomics will use the technology in its biomarker service and collaboration business to help measure the differences in DNA methylation patterns between healthy and diseased tissues.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The agreement is HDC’s second SVM licensing deal in the past two months. The company signed a similar agreement with Bruker Daltonics for applications in clinical proteomics in early August.
Stephen Barnhill, HDC's chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement that the two application areas of methylation and mass spectrometry analysis “underscore the scope and power of HDC's SVM technology as the leading pattern recognition tool.”
HDC holds a large patent portfolio protecting the use of support vector machines in bioinformatics applications. In June, the firm sued Ciphergen and Equbits for infringing its SVM patent estate. Both cases are pending in the US District Court in Marshall, Texas.