novoseek's backgrounder

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novoseek Facts-at-a-Glance:

Web site: http://www.novoseek.com/
Parent Company: Bioalma

Headquarters:
Ronda de Poniente 4, Bajo C
Tres Cantos, Madrid, Spain, 28760

About Bioalma

Located in Madrid, Spain, Bioalma is an IT company specialized in the research and development of biomedical software.

Bioalma's mission is to provide the life science community with innovative information technologies that enable the search, management and relation of the knowledge available in different sources, facilitating its analysis and comprehension.

Bioalma is a privately-held company founded in 2000 as a spinoff of the bioinformatics group of the National Center of Biotechnology (CNB), as part of the Bionostra group. The Bionostra Group is composed of four companies that share the common objective of being leaders in the biotechnology and bioinformatics sectors. Its main activity is scientific research focused on the development of new technologies, products and biotechnology services within the field of human health. Bionostra Group is composed of Bioalma, ChimeraPharma, Bionostra, Microbionta, SynergiaBio and Azure Bio.

Bioalma prides itself on an elite team of well-known, internationally-leading scientists as part of its scientific committee and has successfully marketed its technology to different research institutions, universities, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including the National Institutes of Health, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Roche and Althea Technologies.

novoseek:

novoseek is a dynamic information extraction system for searching the published knowledge in biomedical literature.

novoseek indexes the biomedical literature with text mining technology built by Bioalma that identifies key biomedical terms taking into account external available data and contextual term information. As a result of this indexing technology, novoseek retrieves every document where a term is mentioned no matter the synonym used and discards those documents where the term is used with an unwanted meaning.

novoseek: Serving Many Communities

novoseek is aimed at a variety of audiences within the biomedical and medical community including: students and researchers, medical doctors and students, medical librarians, and biomedical scientists and researchers:

• For scientists researching a cure for disease, or the research associated with a particular gene, novoseek allows them to find the right information that's the most relevant and the most comprehensive through an easytouse search interface that does not require any training.
• For medical doctors conducting patientrelated queries, novoseek enables them to execute searches that will bring up the most relevant information immediately, without requiring a laborintensive search.
• For students and researchers working towards publishing their own medical papers, novoseek quickly allows them to aggregate search results, thereby expediting research and allowing them to publish as quickly as possible.
• For medical librarians, novoseek provides the comprehensive, updated search results that they require as it is equipped to process and catalogue thousands of new articles per day.

The case for conceptual search

The Problem

Available literature is a key element for the implementation of new basic research, as it is for the development of new medicines.

Different names for the same entity among databases; complex data structures that need to be understood; biological concept inconsistency; and heterogeneous user interfaces turn the biomedical knowledge research process into a hard and laborious activity.

The following four steps are necessary when aiming to achieve a complete and efficient biomedical knowledge review:

1. Find databases: identifying biomedical databases with relevant and reliable information is a critical step towards a complete and efficient retrieval of scientific literature.
2. Synonyms: when looking forward to establishing a full literature analysis of a biomedical concept, it is necessary to obtain all the ways in which the concept is referred. This process requires some knowledge of database contents and access application, which differs among data sources.
3. Query: once the information of the different databases is collected, it must be structured, so that the document database interface application will be able to understand it all.
4. Confirm results: the query result needs to be analyzed in order to verify that all the information regarding the biomedical element has been collected.

Thanks to its conceptual search capability, novoseek fuses these four steps and, unlike competing offerings, also analyzes documents so the amount of documents retrieved does not become overwhelming.

novoseek

• Ranks documents according to their informative relevance, in order to identify the most interesting information.
• Ranks authors, letting the user know who the main expert is in relation to the query searched.
• Understands the relevant biomedical concepts, speeding up the reading process and helping in the identification of pivotal information.
• Recognizes the relationships between biomedical concepts. novoseek extracts the key biomedical concepts mentioned in the document set, facilitating both analysis and comprehension.

Why novoseek is Different:

In determining the breadth of scope, Bioalma believes there are more than 2,000 new pieces of biomedical research added daily across 20,500 journals, by 8 million authors. Given this vastness of data, deep information retrieval for a certain biomedical entity often becomes a time-consuming process. For example, novoseek has a dictionary of 3.5 million concepts that amount to more than 200 million concept relations in which to analyze. Unlike competing offerings, novoseek indexes biomedical literature using text mining technology that combines information extraction, name entity recognition and knowledge discovery technologies to provide the most relevant and meaningful biomedical search results. By identifying both synonymous search terms as well as more than 200 million relationships among these terms, novoseek is able to deliver conceptually meaningful results. This allows it to provide the most relevant information while offering greater easeofuse than many of its competitors.

Additionally, competitive biomedical search offerings require users to understand MeSH terms (medical subject headings) to extract the appropriate documents from literature searches, a search of each synonym of the same term separately, and an analysis all of the results to get what they are looking for.

For example, the average number of synonyms for the over two million gene names identified across Medline abstracts, ranges from 12 61, which would require an equal amount of searches on each synonym, which would take an inordinate amount of time. novoseek takes the guesswork out of the equation, finding the most accurate information in much less time.

novoseek's conceptual search essentially lets users search more accurately, in less time and with less effort than any other search offering in the market today. The following graphic illustrates the steps necessary to find research through traditional systems versus using novo| seek.

novoseek Management Team:

Santiago Gimeno de Priede
President
Santiago Gimeno de Priede has solid experience as an entrepreneur and has successfully launched more than five different companies in the Communication and Biotech sectors. He is the Founder of the Bionostra Group as well as Founder and President of Bioalma and Microbionta. He is also an active member of the ASEBIO's board of directors (Spanish Biotech Entrepreneurs Association). Santiago Gimeno de Priede holds a degree in Biological Science and Journalism by the Complutense University in Madrid.

Juan Carlos del Castillo
CEO
Juan Carlos del Castillo has more than 10 years of experience in the biotechnology sector. As an entrepreneur, he founded and is on the board of directors of Bioalma, Bionostra and Chimera Pharma. He has worked as a member of the sideboard of the General Manager of the Homeland Security Department as an expert in management and economy, and was also the Media and Internet director. Prior to that, he worked as general manager of the National Center of Biotechnology, a research center of the National Research Council (CSIC). Juan Carlos del Castillo is also involved in many industry forums such as vice president of BioMadrid. Juan Carlos del Castillo holds a degree in Economics from the Autonoma University in Madrid.

Luis Cornide
General Manager
Luis Cornide has six years of experience in the biomedical IT sector. After doing IT research in encryption algorithms, he joined Bioalma as a technical chief officer, working under the two main product lines, leading different developments groups. Luis Cornide holds a degree of Computational Engineering from the Complutense University in Madrid and MBA from Instituto de Empresa, Madrid.

Ramón AlonsoAllende
Director of Marketing and Business Development
Ramón Alonso Allende has 10 years of experience in the Biomedical IT sector. He joined Bioalma in the scientific research unit and now leads the marketing and business development team. He started his career as a CRA developing new electronic data collection system. He then moved to the Protein Design Group at the National Center of Biotechnology (CNB) to coordinate the bioinformatic development of a European molecular biology project, during which he developed molecular data integration systems. He has participated in other European projects developing data integration interfaces. Ramon AlonsoAllende holds a degree in Pharmacy from the Universidad San Pablo in Madrid and an MBA from the Instituto de Empresa, Madrid.

Christian Blaschke
Scientific Director
Christian Blaschke has more than 10 years of experience in text mining research. At Bioalma, he leads the text mining research group and has served as the principal investigator in several of Bioalma's awarded European research projects. He started his career in the Biomedical IT sector at the Protein Design Group developing data mining and information extraction systems. He was also coordinator of the first edition of the BioCreAtivE contest for text mining algorithms before joining Bioalma. Christian Blaschke holds a degree in Biology, Plant Physiology from Salzburg University, and a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Universidad Autonoma in Madrid.

novoseek's Partners:

Bioalma has a wide reach of global partners, which novoseek leverages as well. Partners span the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain.

• Active Motif: Active Motif offers research kits, assays and the TimeLogic® biocomputing systems to enable scientists to explore the relationships between genes, proteins and metabolic pathways.
• Xennex Inc.: Xennex GeneCards® is a searchable, integrated database of human genes that provides concise genomic, proteomic, transcriptomic, genetic and functional information on all known and predicted human genes.

• EMBL: EMBL is a molecular biology research institute publicly funded by 17 member states in Europe and the Middle East.
• University of Cambridge: The Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR) is a crossdepartmental institute, within the University of Cambridge Clinical School. It provides a unique interface between basic and clinical science that underpins its objective of determining and understanding the molecular mechanisms of disease.

• Siena Biotech: Siena Biotech is a research company focused on drug discovery encompassing a series of technological platforms ranging form target identification to clinical proof of concept.

• National Bioinformatics Institute (INB): INB is a technological platform of Genoma Españ a and a national network for coordination, integration and development of Spanish Bioinformatics Resources in genomics and proteomics projects. Bioalma's expertise in IT and biology and its ability to leverage this expertise to maximize research performance and facilitate scientific discovery make it an ideal partner for INB.
• Spanish National Research Council (CSIC): As the largest public research body in Spain, the Spanish National Research Council provides access to its bibliographic databases for free. These databases comprise all the research published in Spain since the 1970s, and consist of journal articles, reports, collections, conference papers and case studies which fall within the categories of Science and Technology, Biomedicine and Social Sciences and Humanities. Bioalma's text mining technologies are the basis of its partnership with CSIC.

Contact:
ns_info(at)novoseek.com
+34 91 141 71 50

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