Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Ingenuity announce KM collaboration

The system is expected to enhance Millennium's ability to maximize the value from its investments in drug discovery and development, especially from information generated using its high- throughpu

By Editor on Apr 16, 2002

The system is expected to enhance Millennium's ability to maximize the value from its investments in drug discovery and development, especially from information generated using its high- throughput gene-to-patient technology platform. Millennium researchers will be able to computationally search across and integrate diverse conclusions from both internal research and published scientific literature, allowing new insights to be drawn from interpretational knowledge.

According to the collaborators, internal research findings and interpretations will be organized in a knowledge base using a structured vocabulary, making these interpretations readily searchable across the organization and against a knowledge base of published scientific findings codified in the same way. The alliance partners believe the system will allow Millennium researchers to reason across scientific conclusions to develop a better understanding of molecular pathways. Millennium believes the ability to computationally integrate and build upon knowledge in this way will be critical to meeting the productivity challenges of drug discovery and development in the 21st century.

"Millennium has a long and successful record in the application of cutting-edge technology to enhance the drug discovery and development process," said Allan Marchington, Senior Vice President, Productivity, Millennium. "Through this innovative collaboration, we are taking the lead in tackling an enormous unmet need within R & D: effectively capturing and institutionalizing researchers' interpretational knowledge and conclusions, not simply the raw data generated from experiments."

In the collaboration, Ingenuity will deploy its capability to acquire, structure, and deliver knowledge and will provide access to its knowledge base of over 500,000 public findings. Millennium will contribute its expertise in developing innovative processes and informatics platforms for discovery and development of personalized medicines. Millennium will provide R&D funding to Ingenuity and will also make equity investments in Ingenuity. Additional financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

According to Millennium, the new collaboration is a key component of a broader knowledge management initiative within the company.