Life Sciences Community Reacts Favorably to novo|seek

MADRID, SPAIN--(Marketwire - March 9, 2009) - Since its introduction last month, novo|seek -- the new biomedical research tool from Bioalma -- has met with favorable reaction and acceptance within the life sciences community.

Novo|seek offers a powerful alternative to traditional information retrieval systems such as PubMed. Aimed at a variety of audiences within the biomedical community, including students, medical doctors, medical librarians, and biomedical scientists and researchers, novo|seek is a dynamic information extraction system for searching published knowledge in biomedical literature.

Attendees and visitors to the Bioalma exhibit at the recent Molecular Tri-Conference, echoed the positive reaction that novo|seek has received to-date.

Feedback from key communities of interest include the following:

-- From a medical student: "I found the search engine easy to use. It took a few moments to tinker with the filters on the left, but I felt it could help narrow a search quickly once it got me to work. After that point (probably like most physicians) I stopped exploring because it found what I wanted. Its interface is easier to use than PubMed. I would consider using it regularly."

-- From a medical researcher: "I'm not a very technical person. I search for literature in PubMed to prepare clinic sessions but it takes me a lot of time to go through all the results that I get back. Normally I have to ask several questions to get what I'm looking for. With novo|seek, it's really easy. I can check on related concepts and use those to filter the search. That is really convenient for a person who is not really technical."

-- From a scientist: "The ability to filter results speeds up the search process dramatically compared to PubMed as well as the ability to find protocols through filtering. I would recommend this tool highly to my colleagues."

-- From a bioinformatician: "novo|seek is an interesting text mining system that I believe will be useful for researchers not only in their daily search for papers but also to find efficiently literature-based links between biological objects."

-- From a PhD student: "I like the ability to classify the results according to the 11 categories, it makes the research more intuitive. It is definitely more attractive than Google Scholar, an interface that doesn't suit me at all."

-- From a medical librarian at Stanford University: "Novo|seek is an innovative biomedical literature search engine that performs 'entity identification' on PubMed records, thus vastly improving filtering and understanding of search results. It also searches NIH's database of extant grants, CRISP, and does so in a much more elegant manner than CRISP itself."

Since launching novo|seek on February 2, Bioalma has seen a dramatic uptick in web site visits from its various communications avenues, such as their blog, Twitter feed, and direct web site visits. Since February 2, the novo|seek web site has seen a weekly average increase in web traffic of 60 percent, and in the last week alone, saw a 98 percent increase in traffic, during the Tri-Conference.

New elements of the website experience include:

-- Sample search results based on the examples of "cerebral palsy in grants," "Spasmodic Dysphonia IL1-Beta," and "breast cancer since 2008."

-- Video tutorials on searches, such as searching for grant information

-- Frequently Asked Questions about novo|seek.

-- The Knowledge Beyond Words blog with insight into industry trends and debates (such as the debate regarding free access to biomedical knowledge, judgmental heuristics, and professional usage of Google).

Supporting Resources:

For more information on novo|seek, please visit: http://www.novoseek.com.

To download the corporate backgrounder, please visit: www.novoseek.com/info/ns_backgrounder.html

novo|seek Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/novoseek/

novo|seek Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/pages/novoseek/101834395337

novo|seek LinkedIn group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1699237&trk=hb_side_g

About novo|seek

Novo|seek is a dynamic information extraction system for searching the published knowledge in biomedical literature.

Novo|seek indexes the biomedical literature with text mining technology built by Bioalma that identifies key biomedical terms taking into account external available data and contextual term information. As a result of this indexing technology, novo|seek retrieves every document where a term is mentioned no matter the synonym used and discards those documents where the term is used with an unwanted meaning.

About Bioalma

Located in Madrid, Spain, Bioalma is an IT company specialized in the research and development of biomedical software.

Bioalma was founded in 2000 as a spin-off of a bioinformatics group in the National Center of Biotechnology and a privately-held company, as part of the Bionostra group. Bioalma prides itself on an elite team of well-known, internationally-leading scientists as part of its scientific committee and has successfully marketed its technology to different research institutions, universities, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including National Institutes of Health, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Roche and Althea Technologies.

Bioalma is a privately-owned company, part of the Bionostra group. The Bionostra Group is composed of four companies that share the common objective of being leaders in the biotechnology and bioinformatics sectors. Its main activity is scientific research focused on the development of new technologies, products and biotechnology services within the field of human health. Bionostra Group is composed of Bioalma, ChimeraPharma, Bionostra and Microbionta.