Molecular Connections has renewed its tie-up with Protana Inc (Protana), a Canadian company offering an integrated portfolio of applications and laboratory services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Protana has renewed and expanded the scope of the literature mining services collaboration it has with Molecular Connections, stated an official release. The services of Protana help pharma companies add value to their discovery research, preclinical development and early and late stage clinical trials.

Protana applies proprietary proteomics technologies to discover proteins that are modulated in response to drug treatment or disease state. Such proteins have utility as biomarkers or drug targets. Further analysis of Protana experimental data requires study of the scientific literature, which is a rich source of information on protein function, interactions, expression, disease association etc. Protana's access to Molecular Connections literature mining and annotation services enables it to summarize scientific knowledge about proteins in a manner that facilitate Protana's scientific teams make effective research and development decisions.

Dr Thodoros Topaloglou, SVP and the Head of Bioinformatics at Protana, says, "We have established a very productive relationship with Molecular Connections and have been satisfied with their literature curation services which are of high-quality and yet cost-effective. More importantly Molecular Connections has both the scientific strengths and the capability to scale-up. Expansion of our collaboration is a logical move".
Jignesh Bhate, Founder and CEO of Molecular Connections said, "Expansion of our association with Protana once again proves the value being delivered to our partners through our literature curation and annotation services."

The Banglore-based Molecular Connections provides high quality, cost effective text mining, literature curation and annotation services as well as develops databases in the areas of genomics, proteomics, ADME Tox, clinical diseases, drugs, chemistry, patents.

Molecular Connections is founded by Institute of Infocomm Research, Singapore and a life sciences business incubator in India.