Briefs

Burlington, MA - May 7, 2002 - AnVil, a pioneering life sciences discovery company that turns data into decision-quality knowledge, today announced that it has been awarded two Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop software tools used in the discovery of cancer drugs.

The tools and methods that AnVil is developing will advance cancer research by enabling pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies to better identify the effects of potential drug candidates on cancerous cells. These companies can then make more informed decisions about future drugs and treatments.

Under the first grant, AnVil will develop techniques for integrating quantitative cluster comparison metrics with new high-dimensional visualization technologies to provide cancer researchers with unique decision-making tools they can apply to their data. AnVil will apply these new tools to the analysis of the National Cancer Institute DIS compound data set, composed of data on chemical compounds applied to 60 cancer cell lines and combined with an external source of gene expression data for the same 60 cell lines.

The second grant will enable AnVil to develop a powerful new high-dimensional visualization technology to analyze cancer data, as well as new methods of data mining. AnVil will apply this technology to the National Cancer Institute DIS compound data set; performing innovative and efficient data mining on a combination of computed chemical descriptors and cell line GI50 chemical test data to discover new structure activity patterns that may be clinically useful for treating cancer.

For additional information, see www.anvilinfo.com