The Intellectual Property & Science division of Thomson Reuters recently announced the launch of MetaMiner™ Asthma, a disease-focused collaboration committed to advancing research on several pathological pathways that may be the cause of asthma, and the advancement of new methods to profile patients and improve not only the diagnosis but also the treatment of asthmatic patients.
Jon Brett-Harris, from Life Sciences at Thomson Reuters, said in a press release: “Thomson Reuters is delighted to announce its MetaMiner Asthma Partnership program, bridging two of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies with academic and government excellence in asthma disease understanding and treatment. This program creates a venue for participating organizations to collaborate together and with the Thomson Reuters team of systems biology experts in the curation of disease pathways and development of computational methods to advance treatments for asthmatics.”
Through MetaMiner Asthma, unique insights will be discovered regarding the pathological processes and mechanisms underlying asthma, such as the different cell types that are involved in the condition. This collaboration will cover more than 30 new pathway maps regarding the signaling of the immune cells associated with asthma pathology, such as macrophages, T-cells, neutrophils and eosinophils. In order to simultaneously support research studies in the field of asthma and protect eventual intellectual property interests, the pathways cleared will be exclusively available to participating members during the first year.
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MetaCore™, the most comprehensive knowledge-based platform for data mining and functional biology-related analyses in the world, will be delivering the asthma pathway maps. The content can be used for candidate selection, target discovery, translational medicine, biomarker discovery and personalized care applications.
MetaMiner Asthma is the latest off-shoot of the MetaMiner Respiratory Disease program, which also includes MetaMiner COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).
“MetaMiner Disease Partnerships for asthma and COPD will result in approximately 150 maps; this is an unprecedented disease-pathology development that will help industry players, academic researchers, government policy makers, and payers to develop new diagnostics and treatments for asthma, faster,” explained Mr. Brett-Harris.