Alitora.com

Recent News
Blog

August 2009: August 19, 2009, San Francisco, CA

The J. David Gladstone Institutes announced a collaboration with Alitora Systems to develop software technology that facilitates organizational collaboration and enables rapid acceleration of the discovery and evaluation of new drugs. Alitora Systems uses semantic technology to search document and database information in a single collaborative innovation network. The Gladstone collaboration will assist in enhancing Alitora’s product offerings for biotechnology and pharmaceutical discovery and development.

“Meaning-based search technologies reveal valuable, closely related information which is not easily found through regular search or collaborative strategies,” said Alitora CEO Peter Berger. “We hope to bring relevant data to the forefront for researchers and decision-makers who are best positioned to use this information to accelerate development.”

Unlike traditional search technology, Alitora finds information based on relevant meaning, not just keywords. This can reveal new information from previously published work and contribute to progress in current research studies.

“Throw-away data in one area of research, may be a critical factor in another,” said Bruce Conklin, MD, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. “These tools can be used to find intersections in science that can significantly improve the pace of discovery.”

With the current cost of developing a successful drug estimated at $1.2 billion, both Gladstone and Alitora hope to contribute to the current drive to bring down the cost of healthcare and find more effective treatments for disease.

“Inside companies as well as out in the scientific world, there is a wealth of research information that begs to be applied to a particular project,” Berger said. “The key is to use meaning to connect the right data with the right people. Helping them find something they don’t already know.”

Gladstone and Alitora’s collaboration will be ongoing. As part of the collaboration, Dr. Conklin will join Alitora Systems as a member of its Advisory Board to serve along with former officers of Pfizer and Scios. Alex Pico a Gladstone bioinformatics software engineer, plans to join Alitora as its Chief Science Officer where he will be a valuable contributor to the evolution of Alitora Systems’ offerings.

About the Gladstone Institutes
The J. David Gladstone Institutes, an independent, nonprofit biomedical research organization, affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, is dedicated to the health and welfare of humankind through research into the causes and prevention of some of the world’s most devastating diseases. Gladstone is comprised of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology and the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease. More information can be found at www.gladstone.ucsf.edu.
December 2008: December 1, 2008, Alitora Systems joins the World Wide Web Consortium.

We at Alitora are very pleased to announce that we have joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), www.w3.org. The W3C is an organization that brings together different stakeholders in the World Wide Web to develop and reach consensus on web standards. Alitora has participated in the W3C for most of this last year as an invitee to the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group, www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls. We at Alitora look forward to working further with the HCLS on the development of standards for and demonstrating the benefits of applying semantic technology to healthcare and life sciences.

W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines. Since 1994, W3C has published more than 110 such standards, called W3C Recommendations. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software, and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web. In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as “Web interoperability.” By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.
November 2008: November 20, 2008, Alitora Systems announces its partnership with Sciformatix Corporation.

Alitora Systems is pleased to announce its partnership with Sciformatix Corporation and their premier, “On-Demand,” Lab Information Management System. Sciformatix provides Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) solutions that are affordable, easy to configure and deploy. They enable labs to manage their processes and collect, organize and present important information according to their own methods, yet in compliance with regulatory requirements.

In conjunction, Alitora semantic search and collaboration technology and Sciformatix’s LIMS can provide a complete solution for smaller biotech companies. Alitora provides a collaborative, search environment to discover drug targets with both publicly available and proprietary data. Sciformatix provides a system to manage the experimental process once a target is discovered. The results of the experimental process can be shared and evaluated using Alitora, enabling quick iteration and rapid idea advancement.

To learn more about how these solutions can help your biotech business, contact info-at-alitora.com.
October 2008: October 16-18, 2008 Alitora Systems speaks at the Web 3.0 Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, California.

Marc Hadfield, President and CTO, and Peter Berger, CEO, of Alitora Systems were invited to speak at the Web 3.0 Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, California (http://www.web3event.com/santaclara08/). The well attended event focused on advents in Semantic or Linked Data technology and featured some of the industry’s thought leaders from companies such as Yahoo!, Powerset, Dow Jones and MetaWeb, along with many others.

Messrs, Hadfield and Berger were featured in a number of discussions panels including “Tales from the Trenches,” “Start-up 101” and “Infrastructure and Scalability” which addressed the application of technology to solve real world problems.

October 13, 2008, Dr. Richard Lynn joins Alitora Systems’ Advisory Board. Dr. Lynn is the former VP of Commercial Applications and Architecture of Pfizer, Inc. and served as divisional CTO responsible for technology strategy, architecture, vendor management, and innovation, head of technology function for worldwide Medical and Marketing organizations. Presently, he is consulting with JP Morgan Chase on computer infrastructure and architecture for their global organization. He holds a PhD in Chemistry for Harvard University. Dr. Lynn graduated, magna cum laude, from Cornell University with a degree in Chemistry.
August 2008: August 26, 2008, Mr. Charles R. Boggs joins the Alitora’s management team as Director of Corporate Development. Mr. Boggs has worked with early stage technology companies to develop and execute funding campaigns, recruit senior executives and establish early customer and strategic relationships. Mr. Boggs has successfully worked on funding and corporate development for several companies including Gynesonics, SpineWorks, XLumena, Aalnex, Vascular Closure Systems and Vizyontech Imaging. His management career spans more than 25 years during which he has served as a Senior Executive in a public company, taken a company public as CEO, served on the senior team of several startup companies.
June 2008: June 17, 2008 Marc Hadfield, President and CTO of Alitora Systems, will participate in a panel discussion at the Linkeddata Plant Conference in New York, NY. The panel is titled "The Semantic Web is open for business. Are You Ready?" and includes Sergey Chernyshev, CTO, Semantic Communities LLC; Dan Connolly, Research Scientist, W3C; Christine Connors, Global Director, Semantic Technology Solutions, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.; Taylor Cowan, Emerging Solutions Principal, Sabre Holdings, Travelocity; Richard Cyganiak, Reseacher, DERI and Project Leader D2RQ; Nic Fulton Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Reuters Media; and Savas Parastastidis Ph.D., Architect, Technical Computing, Microsoft Research.

This panel will discuss what it will take to get the Semantic Web into the mainstream. What is the Semantic Web? The Semantic Web is an effort lead by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to introduce the ability to encode meaning of web content in the form of metadata. Current web content is created with the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) to describe the layout and linking of content. In the Semantic Web content will be typed based on meaning full annotations expressed as fully qualified Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs, aka URLs). This will allow structured searches across distributed web resources in the web of data: The Data Web. The evolution of the current Web of "linked documents" to a Web of "linked data" is steadily gaining mindshare among developers, architects, systems integrators, users, and more than 200 software companies developing semantic web- oriented solutions. A growing number of online services already support Semantic Web technologies to improve interoperability and publish data on the web.

The panel is moderated by Marco Neumann, New York Semantic Web Meetup; Hank Williams, Founder and CEO, Kloudshare; and Eric Hoffer, Second Integral.

http://www.linkeddataplanet.com/conference/specialev... or http://www.swnyc.org/index.php?title=New_York_Semantic_...
May 2008: May 30, 2008, Alitora wins the Princeton Entrepreneurs' Network National Business Plan Competition. Organized by Princeton Entrepreneurs’ Network the competition lasted several months, included dozens of companies, and required the submission of executive summaries, full business plans and culminated with a 25 minute presentation at Princeton Entrepreneurs' Network’s 9th Annual National Conference, during Alumni week at Princeton. Before a judges' panel of venture capitalists and business leaders, as well as an audience of over 100 conference attendees, Alitora was awarded both the judge's prize and audience favorite award.; May 20, 2008, Marc Hadfield, President and CTO of Alitora Systems, presented at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California. The presentation, entitled "Embedding Semantic Data in Life Science Applications -- Challenges and Successes," addressed the numerous challenges faced by Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Companies in managing, querying and collaborating with their data and successful applications of semantic technologies to these challenges. http://semantic-conference.com/session/1087/
March 2008: The Alitora Systems weblog is launched. The weblog can be accessed at:

http://blog.alitora.com
May 2007: Mr. Richard Mironov joins Alitora Systems' Advisory Board. Mr. Mironov is an invaluable addition with his vast array of skills developed as a CMO, advisor and serial entrepreneur. Read more about Mr. Mironov in our company profile under Advisory Board.
March 2007: Dr. Thomas Chalberg and Mr. Michael Crockett join Alitora Systems' Advisory Board. With them, they bring decades of Pharmaceutical Industry and Early Stage experience. Read more about Dr. Chalberg and Mr. Crockett in our company profile under Advisory Board.