BIOALMA NEWS

Alternative to PubMed Searches by Relevancy Instead of Popularity; Proven Technology Able to Recognize Associated Concepts Saving Researchers Vast Amounts of Time in Locating Valuable Data

Biomedical research and studies are critical to the implementation of new basic research, as it is for the development of new medicines. With the vastness of research data available today – estimated at 18 million documents across more than 20,000 medical journals – it is imperative that the research community have easy access to the latest research information available.

Introduced today by Bioalma, a biomedical software IT company, part of the Bionostra group, novo|seek offers a powerful alternative to traditional information retrieval systems such as PubMed.  Aimed at a variety of audiences within the biomedical community, including students, medical doctors, medical librarians, and biomedical scientists and researchers, novo|seek is a dynamic information extraction system for searching published knowledge in biomedical literature. Using text mining that identifies key biomedical terms that take into account externally available data and contextual term information, novo|seek indexes the biomedical literature in less time and with fewer necessary steps than PubMed and other information retrieval systems.

Created by leading scientists worldwide, novo|seek leverages conceptual search due to its text mining capabilities for the fastest, easiest and most relevant biomedical research results available today. The technology powering novo|seek has traditionally only been available to the biomedical scientist and government research community (used by organizations such as the National Center of Biotechnology) through Bioalma’s subscription-based product, AKS, so today’s announcement marks the first free search engine that offers many of the same powerful features of AKS, but for the broader research community.

“Our mission is to arm the life science community with the information they need to research ailments and illnesses, and develop new research and medicines with a solution that provides analysis of search results and understanding of synonymous terms to get what they need,” said Juan Carlos del Castillo, CEO, Bioalma. “novo|seek leverages the same Medline data as PubMed, but our search capabilities are second to none and yield better, more relevant results much faster and easier without a lot of training.”

Conceptual Search: Why It Works

Available literature is vital for the implementation of new basic research, as it is for the development of new medicines. The biomedical knowledge research process is notoriously hard and laborious due to different names for the same entity among databases; complex data structures that need to be understood; biological concept inconsistency; and heterogeneous user interfaces.

To conduct a complete and efficient biomedical knowledge review, users are typically required to identify biomedical databases in order to search, obtain and understand the synonyms in which the concept is referred, query the information across each database, and analyze the results to verify that all the information has been collected and is accurate. novo|seek’s conceptual search capability fuses these four steps and, unlike competing offerings, analyzes documents so the amount of documents retrieved does not become overwhelming.

novo|seek:

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

Unlike competing offerings, novo|seek 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 and more than 200 million relationships among these terms, novo|seek delivers conceptually meaningful results. This allows it to provide the most relevant information while offering greater ease-of-use when compared to many of its competitors.

“I’ve used Bioalma’s proven text mining technology in the past, and novo|seek provides an extension of those powerful search capabilities to the web, and is available to more users,” said Dr. Reinhard Schneider, Team Leader, Data Integration and Knowledge Management, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). “novo|seek is a very powerful search tool that gives me the depth of information typically only found in large text mining machines. With the easy-to-use interface and the ability to filter results in a number of ways, the system enables me to drill down to the most relevant information very fast and efficiently.”

Additionally, competitive biomedical search offerings require users to understand medical subject heading (MeSH) terms in order to extract the appropriate documents from literature searches, conduct a search of each synonym of the same term separately, and then analyze all of the results to get the desired information.

“I’ve found novo|seek easier to use than PubMed, especially without a technical background because the analysis is done for me, and I can more easily prepare for clinical sessions with one search query, rather than several to locate results,” said Andrea González Pino, MD at Clinico San Carlos Hospital. “What’s unique about novo|seek is the ability to include relevant concepts such as related genes and proteins to further filter and refine my search results.”

novo|seek is available today and Bioalma plans to add additional significant functionality in the coming quarter, such as the ability to search and analyze U.S. grant information for current research projects, access to full-text articles, and the analysis and enablement of full-text search.

For more information on novo|seek, please visit: http://www.novoseek.com. To download the corporate backgrounder, please visit: www.novoseek.com/info/ns_backgrounder.html.