According to Suzanne Mattingly, vice president of marketing at Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Scimagix, up to 70 percent of R&D data exists in the form of images, with much of it stored in disparate, removable storage media that is often difficult to access and use. Scimagix's first commercially available product, the Oracle®/Web-based SIMS™ (Scientific Image Management System), is a database package for the storage, analysis, and mining of annotated experimental image data. SIMS is not an image acquisition product--images are scanned in and stored in the database, along with other relevant data. Thus, the software enables users to tie together image data, as well as proteomics, gene expression, and preclinical data, across the various stages of a given project. This integrated data can therefore be used more effectively by different groups of researchers involved in the development of a particular drug, for example.
Robert Dunkle, president and CEO of Scimagix, observes ...
