SDSC, Melax Tech Secure NIH Contract to Develop COVID-19 Data Knowledge Graph
HOUSTON, March 14, 2022 – Melax Tech, with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, announces that it has been awarded an NIH SBIR Phase I contract focused on developing and improving innovative user-centric computing tools for use in basic and clinical research on infectious, immune and allergic diseases.
The Phase 1 contract, valued at $300,000, was awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for developing a COVID-19 Dataset Knowledge Graph (COVID-DKG) to facilitate integrated analysis of heterogeneous COVID-19 datasets. The work is done in partnership with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), where the researchers bring their experience gained in the development of Knowledge Graphs by participating in the NSF Open Knowledge Network initiative, as well as other projects related to COVID-19.
Despite existing efforts to make COVID-19 datasets available for research purposes, the volume and heterogeneity of COVID-19 data makes it difficult for researchers to find, understand and reuse datasets relevant to research purposes.
According to dr. Jingcheng Du, director of natural language processing (NLP) research at Melax Tech, when researchers want to conduct studies in multiple areas, they often spend considerable effort and time researching and learning the data sources. available. “COVID-DKG has built-in components that support semantic search, visualization, and embedded online analysis on open COVID-19 datasets, facilitating research and development in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19,” Du said.
dr. Pink Stone, Director of the Structural Bioinformatics Laboratory and Head of Bioinformatics and Biomedical Applications at SDSC, added, “Knowledge graphs connect the dots by providing links between otherwise isolated COVID-19 datasets, allowing researchers to gain new knowledge. For example, a dataset published by a journal can be joined with another dataset in a different data repository to facilitate new types of analyses.
About Melax Tech
Melax Tech’s award-winning flagship product, CLAMP, the Clinical Language, Annotation, Modeling and Processing Toolkit, was developed by a team with over 25 years of award-winning clinical experience in NLP. CLAMP enables automatic recognition and encoding of clinical information in patient narrative reports. Melax Tech was founded in 2017 and today has over 700 organizations using their technology. More information on Melax Tech’s solutions is available on the Company Website.
About SDSC
Founded as one of the National Science Foundation’s first supercomputer centers in 1985, SDSC remains at the forefront of high-performance computing. It provides the research community with large-scale computing and data resources, a research network, software, and expertise in computing and data science. Today, SDSC’s efforts also target cyberinfrastructure and bring together the power of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. With large-scale simulations and experiments, SDSC supports the multidisciplinary approach needed to address critical challenges in research and society – from astrophysics and earth science to disease research and discovery. of drugs. SDSC translates this innovation into practice through its collaborative partnerships between academia, industry and the public sector.
Source: Melax Technologies, Inc.
