Linguamatics Sells Bayer CropScience
September 27, 2008
My newsreader snagged this item, which I found interesting. The little-known Linguamatics (a content processing company based in the UK) retained its deal with the warm and friendly Bayer CropScience. The Linguamatics’ technology is called I2E, and Bayer has been using the I2E system since the summer of 2007. In September, Bayer CropScience decided to renew its license and process patent documents, scientific and technical information, and perform knowledge discovery. (I must admit I am not sure how one discovers knowledge, but I will believe the article that you can find here.)
For me, this small news item was interesting for several reasons. First, for many years a relatively small number of companies had been granted access to the inner circle of European pharma. I find it refreshing that after two centuries, upstarts like Linguamatics are able to follow in the footsteps of Temis and other firms who have worked to make sales in these somewhat conservative companies. “Conservative” might not be the correct word. Computational chemists are a fun-loving group. One computational chemist told me last October in Barcelona that computational chemists were pharma’s equivalent to Brazilian soccer football fans. On the off change that a clinical trial goes off the rails, some pharma players prefer keeping “knowledge” quite undiscovered until an “issue” can be resolved.
A representative I2E results display. © Linguamatics, 2008.
Second, Linguamatics–a company I profiled after significant bother and effort–is profiled in my April 2008 study Beyond Search, published by the Gilbane Group. You can learn more about this study here because ferreting out information about I2E is not the walk in the park that I expected from a content processing company with a somewhat low profile. Linguamatics has some interesting technology, and I surmise that the uses of the system are somewhat more sophisticated and useful to Bayer CropScience than “discovering knowledge”.
Finally, Bayer CropScience is a subsidiary of the influential Bayer AG, an outfit with an annual turnover of about US$8.0 billion, give or take a billion because of the sad state of the dollar on the international market. My hunch is that if the CropScience deal feels good, other units of this chemical and pharmaceutical giant will learn to love the I2E system.
Stephen Arnold, September 27, 2008
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