Genomenon®, Inc., has been issued a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office for “Systems and Methods for Electronically Mining Genomic Data”. The patent covers the technology used to mine disease, gene, and genetic mutation and the relationships between diseases and mutations from the scientific literature.

The Mastermind® Genomic Search Engine is the only search engine exclusively focused on finding genomic relationships with diseases from the scientific literature. Mastermind provides rapid insight into the published genomic research for every disease, gene, and mutation found in the literature.

With over 3,000 users in 100 countries, Mastermind accelerates genomic interpretation in clinical labs by providing unique insight into genomic relationships found in millions of scientific articles. Pharma and biopharma scientists use Mastermind to understand the comprehensive genomic landscape associated with any disease in order to identify and prioritize genomic biomarkers for drug discovery and clinical trial targets.

Mastermind reads the titles and abstracts of the entire scientific literature, currently comprising over 30 million scientific papers, and selects the articles with genomic information. The selected articles are then fully indexed to develop a comprehensive view of the genomic landscape. To date, Mastermind has indexed nearly 7 million genetic publications and over 500,000 supplemental data sets, and covers over 4.9 million variants.

The genomic data found in these publications is processed through Genomenon’s Genomic Language Processing (GLP), which is the basis for the patent recently granted by the United States Patent Office. GLP was built from scratch, using the principles of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and adding numerous novel techniques that apply to the language found in scientific articles. GLP uses heuristic algorithms to identify every way that an author can describe a gene or variant, and filters out information that can be mistaken for genomic data.

Mastermind indexes each reference for every combination of diseases, genes, and variants, and delivers a list of clinically prioritized articles, complete with insight into each article. Users can view open access articles and purchase others directly from the publisher to see the complete scientific evidence they need to make the diagnostic report on the patient’s results.

The inventors on the patent are Dr. Mark Kiel, MD, PhD, Founder and CSO of Genomenon, Dr. Kojo Elenitoba-Johnson, MD, and Dr. Megan Lim, MD, PhD. Drs. Elenitoba-Johnson and Lim are Co-Founders and scientific advisors to Genomenon. The invention was made at the University of Michigan and the patent was filed through the university and exclusively licensed to Genomenon when it emerged from the University in 2014.

By TechnologyNetworks