Microsoft BIOIT: Opportunities for Text Mining Vendors
June 14, 2008
I came across Microsoft BIOIT in a news release from Linguamatics, a UK-based text processing company. If you are not familiar with Linguamatics, you can learn more about the company here. The company’s catchphrase is “Intelligent answers from text.”
In April 2006, Microsoft announced its BIOIT alliance. The idea was to create “a cross-industry group working to further integrate science and technology as a first step toward making personalized medicine a reality.” The official announcement continued:
The alliance unites the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, hardware and software industries to explore new ways to share complex biomedical data and collaborate among multidisciplinary teams to ultimately speed the pace of drug discovery and development. Founding members of the alliance include Accelrys Software Inc., Affymetrix Inc., Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Applied Biosystems and The Scripps Research Institute, among more than a dozen industry leaders.
The core of the program is Microsoft’s agenda for making SharePoint and its other server products the plumbing of health-related systems among its partners. The official release makes this point as well, “The BioIT Alliance will also provide independent software vendors (ISVs) with industry knowledge that helps them commercialize informatics solutions more quickly with less risk.”
Rudy Potenzone, a highly regarded expert in the pharmaceutical industry, joined Microsoft in 2007 to bolster Redmond’s BIOIT team. Dr. Potenzone, who has experience in online with Chemical Abstracts, has added horsepower to the Microsoft team.
This week on June 12, 2008, Linguamatics hopped on the BIOIT band wagon. In its news announcement, Linguamatics co-founder Roger Hale said:
As the amount of textual information impacting drug discovery and development programs grows exponentially each year, the ability to extract and share decision-relevant knowledge is crucial to streamline the process and raise productivity… As a leader in knowledge discovery from text, we look forward to working with other alliance members to explore new ways in which the immense value of text mining can be exploited across complex, multidisciplinary organizations like pharmaceutical companies.
Observations
Health and medicine is an important player in the scientific, medical, and technical information sector. More importantly, health presages money. In the US, the baby boomer bulge is moving toward retirement, bringing a cornucopia of revenue opportunity for many companies.
Google has designs on this sector as well. You can read about its pilot project here. Microsoft introduced a similar project in 2006. You can read about it here.
Several observations are warranted:
- There is little doubt that bringing order, control, metadata and online access to certain STM information is a plus. Tossing in the patient health record allows smart software to crunch through data looking for interesting trends. Evidence based medicine also can benefit. There’s a social upside beyond the opportunity for revenue.
- The issue of privacy looms large as personal medical records move into these utility-like systems. The experts working on these systems to collect, disseminate, and mine data have good intentions. Nevertheless, this is uncharted territory, and when one explores, one must be prepared for the unexpected. The profile of these projects is low, seemingly controlled quite tightly. It is difficult to know if security and privacy issues have been adequately addressed. I’m not sure government authorities are on top of this issue.
- The commercial imperative fuels some potent corporate interests. These interests could run counter with social needs. The medical informatics sector, the STM players, and the health care stakeholders are moving forward, and it is not clear what the impacts will be when their text mining reveals hiterto unknown facets of information.
One thing is clear. Linguamatics, Hakia, and other content processing companies see an opportunity to leverage these broader industry interests to find new markets for its text mining technology. I anticipate that other content processing companies will find the opportunities sufficiently promising to give BIOIT a whirl.
Stephen Arnold, June 14, 2008
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