GAMING

The BioAnalytics Group LLC has released BioPathwise 2.0, its software and database system for cross-disciplinary biomedical research teams. An outgrowth of the company's partnerships with pharma, biotech, and device companies, the system is relevant throughout the life cycle of a diagnostic or therapy. Taking a pathway-centric approach, BioPathwise 2.0 provides an innovative interface that facilitates the work of groups with members as diverse as discovery scientists, computational biologists, clinical assay developers, and drug safety analysts. The package helps multidisciplinary biomedical research teams collaborate, organize, analyze and present data and knowledge. "Today's medical research collaborations pull in experts from diverse fields, each with their own language and approach in creating and leveraging data," says G. Scott Lett, Ph.D, the company's CEO. "By allowing each to work with complex datasets in ways that are comfortable to them, and providing clear tools for sharing information in the interest of decision making, BioPathwise 2.0 helps create value with a minimum of missteps." According to Dr. Lett, "It's like a whiteboard that translates between the language of biology and the language of mathematics -- and back again. By beginning with the paradigms of each skill base in the collaboration, we are able to create an environment where each is comfortable and communicates confidently with the other team members." The BioPathwise 2.0's reaction repository and interface tools offer unprecedented access to both existing and proprietary data, pulling in peer reviewed information about any aspect of a reaction that is being studied. To a biologist, the tools have a familiar look that allows them to draw pathways and conduct virtual experiments, at the same time that computational biologists and statisticians can view mathematical formulas that represent the processes at work, and programmers can interface with standard tools and their own technology to integrate legacy data and useful packages from other software providers. The initial BioPathwise package was developed to help make computational modeling accessible to the immunology research community. Since 2005, a version of BioPathwise has been used and enhanced as part of the NIH funded PRIME initiative, The Program for Immune Modeling and Experimentation, a five-year project sponsored by the NIAID through the Department of Homeland Security. The privately owned company is a spinout of Physiome Sciences, which was located in nearby Princeton, NJ until 2003. At that time, Physiome moved to Boston to become a drug discovery company. To initiate the new company, Dr. Lett and a small team licensed algorithms and data developed during the 50 million dollar development of its modeling and simulation service products.