AxCell Biosciences has announced that it is using IBM DB2 database technology to help its scientists chart the communication pathways within cells that enable proteins to interact and cause or prevent diseases. AxCell is a subsidiary of Cytogen Corporation.

AxCell researchers are using IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner to gain new insights into how proteins interact in complex cellular communication networks. Ultimately, this knowledge could help drug makers design more effective and less toxic drugs that can disrupt the communication systems of abnormal proteins without harming healthy cells.

DB2 Intelligent Miner provides powerful mining algorithms that can sift through massive amounts of data and uncover associations, patterns, and trends that can lead to scientific discovery. DB2 Intelligent Miner also includes time-sequence algorithms that can reveal examples of similar progressions of a disease over a period of time.

AxCell will also augment its new internal data mining system with IBM DiscoveryLink data integration software. DiscoveryLink provides customers with a federated approach to data management, enabling them to access, manage and analyze data wherever it resides -- regardless of the database or data type. Using DiscoveryLink, AxCell researchers can perform simultaneous queries against multiple data sources -- accessing data in different formats and files -- and get results quickly delivered in a consolidated, consistent format, without actually moving the data or changing its underlying structure.

AxCell's systems biology approach to drug discovery involves the efficient identification of peptide ligands that bind to modular domains on signalling proteins. These peptides are used to identify additional signaling proteins, which share that domain. Bioinformatic analysis of the ligands and signalling proteins leads to identification of additional peptides and proteins and the pathways in which they are active. This may lead to identification of targets that can be validated in biological models and formatted in high-throughput assays to screen against natural product and small molecule libraries for potential inhibitors or modulators of these validated targets.

In addition to deploying DB2 Intelligent Miner Technology and DiscoveryLink, IBM and AxCell expect to explore research collaborations in areas such as visualization, pattern discovery and protein folding analysis.