Press Release
Pangea Systems and Intelligent Medical Objects form Pharmacogenomics Collaboration
04/09/1998
Pangea to Adopt IMO's Medical Lexicon as Standard
Descriptive Tool for Medical Information
OAKLAND, California, April 9, 1998 - Pangea Systems®, Inc.
and Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc., (IMO) of Chicago, Illinois today
announced a three year collaboration aimed at standardizing the way that
medical and veterinary information is described and tracked in
biopharmaceutical research. The two companies will incorporate IMO's
Medical Lexicon into Pangea's information management environment, thus
enabling Pangea's customers to use an integrated coding system to
collect and annotate the physiological samples employed in their gene
expression and pharmacogenomic databases.
The IMO Medical Lexicon integrates and cross-links three coding
systems (SNOMED, ICD9, and CPT) that are widely used by physicians,
researchers, pathologists, and hospitals to categorize and describe
medical information. The IMO Lexicon includes patient symptoms,
demographics, disease states, tissue morphology and medical/surgical
procedures. Incorporating the IMO Medical Lexicon into Pangea's
bioinformatics platform will allow pharmaceutical developers to use the
same standard codes in their pre-clinical and genomic research efforts.
"The collaboration with IMO will enable us to tighten the
linkage between tissue providers, both human and animal, and Pangea's
biopharmaceutical customers who will employ information about those
tissues and the individuals from which they came in drug discovery,"
said Joel Bellenson co-founder of Pangea Systems. "Eventually, we
believe this better handling capacity for medical information will be
extended to improved disease diagnosis and the fine-tailoring of drug
treatments to specific patient needs based on their pharmacogenomic
profiles."
"We are very excited about the prospect of the IMO Medical
Lexicon becoming a standard for use in the burgeoning field of molecular
medicine," said Frank Naeymi-Rad, President of IMO. "Pangea is
an ideal partner for us in this effort, due to the company's focus on
creating an open, flexible computing environment that can accommodate
and integrate a wide variety of genomic and drug-discovery databases and
applications."
Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc., (IMO) is a medical software
development and knowledge management consulting firm. The IMO core team,
consisting of medical doctors, software developers and engineers, is
based in Chicago with offices in California and England. ORACLE
Corporation has nominated IMO for the Smithsonian Institute's award on
using technology for the benefit of humanity. For more information about
IMO and IMO's products and consulting services, call 888-IMO-MAIN
(466-6246) or visit IMO's web site at http://www.imo-online.com.
Pangea Systems, Inc. is a leader in advanced bioinformatics-the
application of information technology to biological research. Pangea
Systems' sophisticated, intuitive software applications enhance the
ability of pharmaceutical and biotech companies to discover the
molecular mechanism of a disease. These applications integrate data with
analysis and visualization tools for biological and chemical
information, effectively simplifying and accelerating the drug discovery
process. Customers selecting Pangea's software solutions are able to
transform raw data into valuable information, allowing scientists to
focus on biology instead of computer science.
The Company's software applications leverage life science
knowledge and employ industrial-strength relational database management
systems, a distributed, open architecture and Java-enabled, web-based
technologies.
Incorporated in 1993, Pangea Systems, Inc. is a privately held,
Oakland, California-based company. For more information, contact Pangea
Systems, Inc., at (510) 628-0100, or e-mail us at
info-pr@PangeaSystems.com or visit http://www.PangeaSystems.com