March 12, 2007
Linguamatics
Roger Hale
COO
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
At Linguamatics, we’ve always been driven by our customers. We’ve built our business through gaining their trust, and by working closely with customers to demonstrate the value of our solutions. We’ve focused on our core strengths and exploited our depth of expertise in text mining for life science. We’ve also been fortunate to have supporters in the community who’ve recognized the unique benefits of our offering. Proof of our success is that in a relatively short time we’ve gained a significant presence in pharma/biotech, and our I2E platform is now licensed by half of the global top 10 pharma companies.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
The life science industry is having to adapt to changing market conditions, with increased pressure on drug pipelines, the need to decrease attrition and time to market, and reduced reliance on blockbuster drugs. Among other things, this demands more systematic and efficient use of information to make better decisions more quickly. Organizations will need to maximize the value of existing text-based content from internal and external sources. It’s a tough challenge; around 3 million newly published articles were added to the Medline database over the past five years and that rate of growth is set to rise.
What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
Linguamatics offers agile, scalable Natural Language search software that enables customers to extract hidden facts and relationships from online text resources much faster and more effectively than with a standard search engine. Our solution leverages domain knowledge such as ontologies, and helps get answers required for project decision support from existing “unstructured” information resources such as journal articles, patents, news feeds, or regulatory documents. Applications span early discovery to late development and business intelligence, including target ID and validation, biomarkers, safety, and pharmacovigilance. We also offer consultancy backed by a wealth of experience in text analytics for the life sciences.
Partnerships are an effective way to track life science advances and ensure that your company delivers timely products and services. Which life sciences companies or organizations have you partnered with or invested in and why?
Pooling expertise can be an important aspect of meeting customer requirements. Linguamatics partners with other best of breed companies that have complementary technology. For example, our recently announced partnership with InforSense enables integration of the agile text mining capabilities of our I2E system with the powerful analytic tools in InforSense KDE to provide customers with rapid, high-volume text analytics.
We also work with companies that provide specialist domain expertise to inform and contextualize search, and we have strategic collaborations with life science knowledge organizations and content providers. We are very careful, however, that collaborations are based on actual customer need.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
We’re constantly striving to make text mining more productive for customers. The recently released I2E version 2.9 includes improvements such as leveraging ontologies more effectively, generating interaction networks on the fly, and specific features for mining full text documents. There’s much more still to come. Planned developments in the near term are aimed at making the benefits of text mining more easily accessible to the occasional end user, and at providing enhanced search and administration features for the information professionals in the enterprise. This will enable research groups to better pinpoint key information buried in the literature on a regular, systematic basis.
Where do you see your company in five years?
The success of the life science industry in reducing time and cost to market for new therapies will increasingly depend on effective use of information. Linguamatics is well positioned to be a key player in meeting that goal. We’re already seeing semantic search and text mining begin to take off. Demand for these tools is supported by underlying trends such as increasing compute power, greater storage capacity, and better access to full-text content. Life science will remain a core area for us, and if our current growth-rate continues, I see Linguamatics’ solutions being deployed enterprise-wide throughout the industry.