NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Berg Biosystems and GNS Healthcare today announced a joint venture to "unlock the key molecular drivers of complex diseases and drug efficacy and safety."
The new company called MAP Biosystems will combine Berg's Interrogative Biology drug discovery platform with GNS' supercomputer-driven REFS modeling and simulation platform, and will allow for biological insights from 'omics-based pre-clinical and clinical data feeds using computational biology methods. The result is a differential understanding of disease and health, GNS Healthcare said.
The focus of MAP Bio will be on finding new indications for existing drugs with collaborators.
"The collaboration signifies a novel innovative step in medicine that seeks to understand causality and use it as a template for a new generation of drug development," GNS added.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Niven Narain, president and CTO of Berg, said in a statement, "The unique combination of unbiased systems biology and artificial intelligence-based systems engineering creates a true data-driven approach to therapeutic and diagnostic development."
Berg, based in Boston, uses network biology templates to mine disease pathophysiology. Its Interrogative Biology drug discovery platform enables the identification of therapeutic and biomarker candidates for drug discovery and development.
GNS, a Cambridge, Mass.-based subsidiary of Via Science, is a healthcare IT firm. The REFS platform uses integrated machine learning algorithms and software to extract "causal" relationships from complex data.