1. Positioning
Biovista develops software-based products and services for knowledge-intensive applications in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Its products are based on Systems Literature Analysis (SLA) of science papers and patents. SLA is used to focus on two areas: discovery/diagnostic R&D and also business analysis applications.
Discovery/diagnostic R&D
Systems Biology and Experiment Design
Understanding correlations between multiple research parameters to improve experiment design
Focused target arrays
Designing focused arrays of target genes and proteins
Clinical diagnostics and disease signatures
Tracking reagents for clinical diagnostic applications. Identifying intersecting disease signatures.
Novel targets
Protein targets that have common use as intersections of disease groups.
Business analysis applications
Customer targeting
Profiling and generating large targeted marketing campaigns aimed at researchers, based on their precise experiment habits.
Competitive intelligence
Profiling competitor companies using experimental citation data and high-throughput patents analysis.
2. Market Need
Discovery/diagnostic R&D applications
1. Efficient use of literature
Researchers in industry and academia spend an average of 10-20% of their time on searches in databases like MedLine, Google and others. At most, they are able to scan and read the full text of no more than 100 papers a year, out of the 0.5 million papers published per year. They miss critical information and design experiments without the benefit of consensus expertise. They rely on simple ranking by the search engines to list vast numbers of papers, and waste time finding relevant data. On average, it is estimated that a researcher will waste about 30% of their literature search time on irrelevant data.
2. Experiment design
Experiment design suffers because researchers select and purchase the wrong reagents for their experiments. This is because they have no good way to help them find the right experimental conditions, as published in peer-reviewed papers. It is estimated that a lab will waste about 20-30% of its consumables budget on the wrong reagents and conditions.
3. Intersecting disease signatures
Diseases are typically analyzed in terms of small gene groups that are shown to be differentially expressed in the disease of interest. This ignores the effect of other intersecting diseases that might be present at the same time in the same patient, as is often the case, for example in the metabolic syndrome, diabetes and obesity and many others. There is a recognition of the need to characterize diseases in terms of genes that are relevant with respect to the specific disease and simultaneously other intersecting ones.
Business analysis applications
1. Customer profiling for suppliers
There are over 1,000 companies that supply reagents and other products to researchers worldwide. These suppliers have a constant need to profile their customers needs and generate large numbers of targeted mailings. They have limited ways to achieve this constant and repeating need.
2. Competitive intelligence
Using the research and patent literature in high-throughput mode, it is possible to systematically extract data and trends about competitors and their R&D activities, as well as their relative market share, in ways that complement traditional analyses based on published financial data.
3. Technology
Biovista’s technology to perform SLA consists of a proprietary platform called Discovery Algorithmics™ (DA). DA automatically scans full-text data (Biovista’s database consists of all 14+ million MedLιne abstracts, over 60,000 full text papers from leading journals, over 300,000 life science patents and over 400,000 life science press releases) with over 300,000 terms structured in a variety of proprietary ontologies. The databases are constantly updated and the output varies with the application (see below).
4. Applications, Products and Target Markets
The table below organizes Biovista’s products relative to the applications and target markets.
| Application | Product | Target Market |
| Discovery/diagnostic R&D |
| Systems Biology and Experiment Design | BEA (Biolab Experiment Assistant) | Lab researchers in industry or academia, independent of area of research |
| Focused target arrays | BEA | Microarray companies; Genomics groups |
| Clinical diagnostics | Reagent Tracker™ and BEA | Biomarker groups and companies; Diagnostic antibody companies |
| Disease signatures | BEA | Discovery, validation and clinical groups |
| Novel targets | BEA plus LBD (Literature Based Discovery module) | Discovery, validation and clinical groups |
| Business Analysis |
| Customer profiling for suppliers | Journal Research Analyst (JRA) | Reagent and lab supplier companies |
| Competitive intelligence | JRA and Patent Analyzer™ | Reagent and lab supplier companies; Biopharma business units; patent attorneys |
5. Pipeline
Biovista conducts its own R&D and has a number of projects in development:
> Knock-out/RNAi Modeler: simulation of a knock-out experiment
> Array Designer: optimized design of focused protein arrays
> Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) Module: finding novel targets that link diseases
> Disease Signatures Module: characterizing diseases by intersecting signatures of genes, pathways and other diseases
> Novel targets: Biovista is using its LBD and Disease Signature modules to characterize intersecting disease signatures and identify novel targets that potentially serve as links between diseases, where a drug identified for use against that target in one disease might benefit the intersecting ones as well.
6. Intellectual Property
Biovista has and is filing patent applications on its products and methods. In addition, Biovista is using its own products to discover and validate targets with novel applications using SLA, and plans to file patents appropriately.
7. Exposure
> Biovista presented its SLA technology in 2004 at the BioLink conference in Boston, at the Drug Discovery meeting in Cyprus, at the CHI Cheminformatics meeting in Philadelphia, at the Chinese Biotech Association meeting in Maryland, at the BioNova meeting in Athens and others. It has also been invited to write a review on SLA for the journal Bioinformatics for the Fall of 2004.
> Biovista management has authored papers that have appeared in several peer reviewed publications, including Nature Biotechnology and others.
8. Collaborations and clients
> Biovista’s technologies are being beta-tested at Harvard, Rockefeller, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Auckland.
> Biovista is in negotiations for pilot installations with major pharmaceutical companies as well as leading universities.
> Biovista participates in several EU collaborative projects primarily in the IST and Life Sciences program Areas. Collaborators include major universities and corporations including Unilever, France Telecom, PIRA, IBM, EMBL, Fraunhoffer-IPSI, Universities of Liverpool/Geneva/Manchester/Saarlandes/Innsbruck and others.