Bioalma said today that the National Institutes of Health has expanded an existing license agreement for its AlmaKnowledgeServer 2 text-mining software.
NIH will use Bioalma's platform to support the Human Salivary Proteome Project. The project is funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and the NIH Center for Information Technology.
NIH first licensed AKS2 a year ago. Bioalma said today that it has expanded its licenses by more than 25 percent but did not disclose additional terms of the agreement.
AKS2 is a web-based platform that costs $135 per single user for academics. AKS2 can also be installed enterprise-wide for use behind a firewall.
In a statement, Ramon Alonso-Allende, director of marketing and business development at Bioalma, said that being selected by NIH is a "proof point" for the firm's text-mining technology.
According to a list of projects underway at the NIH's High-Performance Computing and Informatics Office, the Human Salivary Proteome Annotation Project aims to create a catalog of all salivary secretory proteins using high-throughput proteomics.
HPCIO is developing a wiki-based platform to allow scientists to collaborate and annotate proteins with emerging information such as associated pathways or functional information.
To date, according to the HPCIO, the wiki contains 170,000 pages of experimental data. The plans are to add functionality so users can explore the "knowledge space" of each protein.