IO INFORMATICS’ SENTIENT CHOSEN AS DATA INTEGRATION ENVIRONMENT FOR NEW WORLD-CLASS CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR THE PREVENTION OF ORGAN FAILURE (PROOF)

BERKELEY, CA - VANCOUVER, BC - Sept. 26, 2008. IO Informatics’ (IO) Sentient software suite (www.io-informatics.com) has been named the data integration environment for the new Centre of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF) in Vancouver, Canada. IO will supply $4.1 million worth of Sentient components along with consulting services to the PROOF Centre. The PROOF Centre intends to lead the way in finding diagnostics and therapeutic solutions to the increasing burden of heart failure, kidney failure and lung disease on patients and healthcare providers.

PROOF is built on university-enabled world-class research, high-performance analytic technology platforms, and computational leadership. The PROOF team is particularly based on advanced biomarker discovery platforms for rigorous assessment of genes, proteins and metabolites in blood, urine and tissue. The strongly multi-disciplinary, solution-oriented team, with excellent managers, will bring a contemporary approach to feeding the pipeline for biomarker validation and qualification, disease re-classification, and molecular target validation. PROOF translation and biomarker adoption will be enabled by a long tradition of health care - university partnership in research, innovation and education.

“We are very happy to have IO’s Sentient platform as our data integration environment for PROOF. The choice of Sentient is based on our past experience in working with IO and its technology at the James Hogg iCAPTURE Centre for Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Research (iCAPTURE) the anchor location for PROOF, where it plays an integral role in our data capture, integration, access and knowledge building. Sentient will play an integral role in helping us deal with the data complexity and volume that PROOF’s work will generate. It is essential that we are able to pull all data types from the various sources into one place and make it available to the spectrum of disciplinary specialists involved in the PROOF endeavor,” stated Dr. Bruce McManus, Director of PROOF.

Erich Gombocz, IO VP and Chief Scientific Officer, said “We are delighted to provide the data integration framework for what we know is a world-class team that has a mission to deliver new informatics methods to support clinical practices that will enable people to live longer and healthier lives. IO has benefited greatly from the relationship with iCAPTURE and the University of British Columbia (UBC). They have made extremely useful contribution to the evolution of Sentient through their feedback as customers and as members of our Semantic Working Group. The PROOF initiative - being dependent on securely sharing key information from many different research groups - is applying semantic deep data integration beyond capture and access across all its sources. This leads to enhanced knowledge as it provides functional linking from genomics, proteomics and metabolomics all the way through translational and clinical research. Doing so, will not only accelerate biomarker discovery, but also elevate it to new a level of understanding of complex biological functions. We congratulate UBC on the establishment and support of PROOF.”

IO Informatics has a successful history and experience in the area of data integration for Translational Medicine/Biomarker research. In addition, the company is strongly focused on development and delivery of software tools that extend and apply the latest advancements in the area of Semantic Web applications. IO created the Semantic Applications Working Group, whose mandate is to identify areas where Semantic technology can be developed to help life science researchers better understand relationships between their data, permitting them to recognize the underlying biological functions. The working group is made up of representatives from: IO, CLDA, Viamet, iCAPTURE, Pfizer and MD Anderson. IO Informatics will shortly be announcing the creation of a HealthCare Informatics Working Group, whose mission is to bring together pharmaceutical company researchers, physicians, hospitals, centers of research excellence, healthcare providers in order to investigate new integration methods for data sharing across a spectrum ranging from drug discovery to patient care.

Background Information

About IO Informatics
IO Informatics is at the forefront of a global revolution in software methods for data integration. IO Informatics’ Sentient suite of software products enables biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical and other life science researchers to structure and define complex data relationships, view these relationships, query them, and capitalize on them — all within a secure, compliant, auditable framework that helps organizations accumulate and leverage knowledge. Founded in 2003, IO Informatics is headquartered in Berkeley, California (www.io-informatics.com).

About PROOF
The Centre of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF) will lead the way in finding practical, profitable and cost-effective solutions to the oppressive and expanding burden that heart, lung, and kidney failure imposes on Canadian society, ensuring timely commercialization from research solutions at the highest level of excellence. PROOF will enable a better understanding of disease risks, the development of biomarkers of occurrence, severity and progression to organ failure, and an accelerated, personalized approach by development of biomarkers to guide therapy. The University of British Columbia is the host institution for PROOF which is sited at the iCAPTURE Centre within the Providence Heart + Lung Institute at St. Paul’s Hospital, Vancouver, BC. The team’s core competencies are also drawn from Vancouver Coastal Health and other sites from British Columbia, Alberta, across Canada, and other countries. The team includes world-class scientists, clinicians, health administrators and policy leaders committed to improving the standard of care and quality of life for all patients in Canada faced with heart, lung and kidney failure (www.proofcentre.ca), (www.nce.gc.ca).

back