New search engine for researchers

Source: the hindubussinessline.com

Scientists and research scholars have to dredge a huge volume of scientific literature to arrive at the information they need. Conventional search engines look for words rather than ideas.

For example, a part of the literature may say that drug A has a particular effect (say, increase the secretion) on a body chemical B. Some other document may show that B has an inhibiting effect on bacteria C. A search engine cannot throw up the effect on A on B.

Search engines work on semantics but it would help the scientific community if software were available for unearthing hidden trends and connections buried in the literature.

This literature is huge. For example, Pubmed is a depository of about 16 million articles. A researcher spends half his research time in culling out what he wants. Another example is the information with various patent offices.

The Chennai-based bio-informatics company Brainwave Biosolutions Ltd has come up with a tool, which it calls Gene Minerva, to help researchers shorten their search time. Gene Minerva is a `text mining product', developed mainly to help drug discovery researchers look for hidden patterns from unstructured literature data.

"The software will help the computer understand sentences as we do," Dr Shome Nath Mitra, Chief Scientific Officer, Brainwave, told a press conference here.

The tool, that took four years and Rs 2.2 crore to develop, uses `natural language processing technology' to achieve this.

After being tested at Bio Alma, Spain, the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Punjab, and a US company, Gene Minerva has just been launched in the market. Brainwave intends to charge $1,800 as annual licence fee, but the company is open to discussing packages and short-term usage rates.

Dr Mitra said that the product competes with others such as Ariadne Genomics, Cognia, Reel Two, Clear Forest and Temis. He claimed that Gene Minerva was found to be more efficacious, in tests.


Gene Minerva is the first major product of Brainwave Biosolutions, a company founded by Ms Valli Arun, daughter of Mr A.C. Muthiah, Chairman of SPIC Group of companies. The company targets 2,000 customers in two years.