IBM Rolls Out Alpha-Code Life Sciences Tools

The life sciences are one of the fastest growing industry segments for IBM. In an effort to further explore the software needs of biological researchers, the company is releasing Thursday several publicly available life sciences software tools.

All of this software is available for preview and free download at AlphaWorks, a division of IBM that rolls out code for developers that is still in the earliest stages of development.

IBM then commercializes some of these nascent efforts originally made available through AlphaWorks. About 40 percent of technologies posted to the AlphaWorks site are eventually incorporated into IBM products or licensed to third-party developers.

The life sciences software offerings released Thursday are intended to help medical centers, pharmaceutical companies and research institutions more easily manage and mine different types of data, capture and share information from disparate sources, as well as streamline and automate internal workflow analysis.

IBMs new life sciences tools include the following:

• The Advanced Pattern Search toolkit allow users to search for complex patterns in sequential data such as genome and protein sequences, text, and times series data.
• CliniMiner is a tool that demonstrates data mining techniques for detecting unexpected relationships in large patient clinical data sets. The application is able to analyze and quantify complex associations in large heterogeneous datasets, and to find unexpected associations in clinical data.
• Bioinformatic Workflow Builder Interface (BioWBI) and an online Web Services Bioinformatic Analysis Workflow (WsBAW) engine together enable the creation of large portals to provide simplified workflow analysis for the two earliest phases of drug discovery.
• The IBM Frequent Subgraph Miner uncovers bioinformatic information from structurally similar chemical compounds by graphing structured data.
• The IBM Electronic Common Technical Document Viewer is used to electronically submit clinical research studies to agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration.