IU Startup Breaks Down Data Silos for Drug Discovery
If you happen to examine a list of possible side effects for any given medication, it’s plain to see that for every advancement pharmaceutical science, knowing exactly how a drug will behave is far from cut and dry. But Data2Discovery has come out of the woodwork to shed some light on the issue.
The early-stage company, co-founded by two faculty members from Indiana University’s (IU) School of Informatics and Computing, has the expressed goal of commercializing what it calls semantic link association prediction, or SLAP, whose purpose is to find associations between drugs and gene targets with the help of semantics.
As David Wild, co-founder and chief scientific officer for Data2Discovery explains, SLAP is expected to offer the greatest benefit for pharmaceutical researchers who have access to multiple, massive datasets that have until now been divided into silos, either within a single organization or even across public and private sectors of life sciences research.
What Data2Discovery has created to address this problems is a comprehensive, integrated dataset that combines public and private information and brings it together in a way that is searchable through plain language.
“There are huge, unmet opportunities in the intelligent use of complex, integrated data in drug discovery and health care, and we are excited to be one of the early leaders in this field,” says Wild.
With the help of the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, the company is already working to create a map of the molecular connections of type 2 diabetes to help better predict what effects the disease will have. The company is also working with “a large pharmaceutical company” to predict adverse drug reactions and drug toxicity.
The company’s partner, the Innovate Indiana Fund, is a state-based, $10 million venture capital fund whose goal is to invest in University-affiliated startups. Among its sectors of interest are biotechnology and information technology, making Data2Discovery an ideal startup.
“The research and development work that is being conducted by Data2Discovery is not only innovative, it is also contributing to Indiana’s growth as a life sciences hub,” says Ken Green, managing director of the Innovate Indiana Fund.
