Thomson Reuters Launches Asthma Disease Partnership Program

Company works with leading pharmaceutical organizations to advance asthma research

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Feb 26, 2013, 08:30 ET

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world's leading provider of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced the launch of MetaMiner™ Asthma, the latest industry-academic-government, disease-focused collaboration dedicated to advancing the understanding of pathological pathways that cause asthma and the development of novel patient profiling methods to improve the diagnosis and treatment for asthmatic patients.

"Thomson Reuters is delighted to announce its MetaMiner Asthma Partnership program, bridging two of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies with academic and government excellence in asthma disease understanding and treatment", said Jon Brett-Harris, managing director of Life Sciences at Thomson Reuters. "This program creates a venue for participating organizations to collaborate together and with the Thomson Reuters team of systems biology experts in the curation of disease pathways and development of computational methods to advance treatments for asthmatics."

MetaMiner Asthma will provide unique insight into the pathological mechanisms underlying asthma, including the different cell types involved in the disease. The result of this partnership will add to the currently available collection of respiratory maps by producing over 30 new pathway maps related to the signaling of immune cells involved in asthma pathology, such as T-cells, macrophages, eosinophils and neutrophils. These maps and the insights from computational analyses using the pathways will be exclusively available to participating members for the first year, in order to aid in asthma research and protect intellectual property interests.

The asthma pathway maps will be delivered via MetaCore™, the world's most comprehensive, knowledge-based platform for data mining and functional biology-related analysis. The content can be used for target discovery, candidate selection, biomarker discovery, translational medicine and personalized care applications.

MetaMiner Asthma is the most recent phase of the MetaMiner Respiratory Disease program, which also includes MetaMiner COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). "MetaMiner Disease Partnerships for asthma and COPD will result in approximately 150 maps; this is an unprecedented disease-pathology development that will help industry players, academic researchers, government policy makers, and payers to develop new diagnostics and treatments for asthma, faster," said Mr. Brett-Harris.

Learn more about the MetaMiner Disease Partnership program.

Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs approximately 60,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

SOURCE Thomson Reuters