24 Sep 2002 - Partnership between PharmaDM and Rega Institute (Leuven, Belgium) in second gear

The Rega Institute, Leuven, Belgium, is world renowned with regard to many interdisciplinary aspects of HIV research. Primary research focus includes:

• Screening potential new anti-HIV drugs for their specific inhibitory activity against viral replication, deducing structure-activity and structure-specificity relationships.
• Identifying molecular mechanisms of action as well as molecular causes of viral resistance to drugs.
• Optimising HIV therapy through predictions of therapeutic response, in addition to time and causes of therapy failure.

The Rega Institute generates many data of different content (biological, chemical, clinical). In order to deduce relevant and novel research insights, however, it is vital that all these different data resources are correlated with each other. Therefore, the collaboration with this Institute is the ideal opportunity for PharmaDM to prove the success of its integrated drug discovery data analysis approach.

PharmaDM is singularly responsible for the development of second generation (relational) data mining technology in drug discovery and is consequently leading the evolution of drug discovery data analytics. The company has created novel data mining solutions that permit drug discovery researchers to:

• Extract proprietary knowledge from integrated drug discovery data:
  • Proprietary and public
  • Biological, chemical and clinical
  • Structured and unstructured (text, images)
• Use a wholly integrated approach, through unique relational data mining software

Following the set-up of a mineable data warehouse for the Rega Institute, PharmaDM has begun to implement its data mining suite DMax^TM for use with virology (HIV) data. Mining of structure-activity and structure-specificity relationships has already started, and over the coming months, virological and clinical data will be included in the analysis.

"PharmaDM is very happy with this collaboration. The role of the Rega Institute as a β test site, will allow us to further improve performance and user-friendliness of the software, and to develop a showcase data mining suite in virology" (Dr. Els Vanheusden, CEO of PharmaDM)

"This will allow researchers at the Rega Institute to truly and maximally exploit the wealth of data that have been generated. We expect this collaboration to lead to further breakthrough research findings in the HIV domain" (Prof. Dr. Erik De Clercq, Chairman of the Rega Institute)