Pharmaceutical companies understand there is tremendous potential value locked away in the vast silos of available public and proprietary data. However, this potential is unrealized since the current computation infrastructures are not capable of linking the immense amounts of data together to find key insights.
In March 2017, Data2Discovery was awarded a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) via the highly competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II program to develop the computational infrastructure to address this need. The grant will support Data2Discovery's efforts to support translational and phenotypic research on vast interlinked datasets; which will include applications in Drug Repurposing, Toxicology and Safety, and Phenotypic Analysis.
"Drug Discovery is ripe for disruptive innovation! This grant will enable us to create new data infrastructures that cross preclinical and clinical boundaries in pharma", says Shelley London, Data2Discovery's CEO.
The infrastructure will include a Linked Data Ecosystem (LDE) enabling flexible linking of both public and proprietary data; a computation layer for advanced network analytics; and an interaction layer to enable building specific, fit-for-purpose, end-user solutions.
"The project is utilizing highly-scalable technologies and custom algorithms capable of operating on the vast networks of public and proprietary life sciences data becoming available to drug researchers", says Chief Technology Officer and Principal Investigator for the project, Randy Kerber.
"We are on the verge of a transformational change, where pharmaceutical companies will essentially become data companies", says Dr. David Wild, Data2Discovery’s co-Founder and President, and Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. "Our technologies are facilitating a completely new way to think about data and how it can be used to drive disease treatment”.
Data2Discovery's business strategy includes empowering industry with faster and more efficient ways to cure specific diseases and find novel therapeutic solutions.