Molecular Connections' XTractor, a manually curated literature alert service, has managed to garner a user base of over 250 pharma companies over a span of nine months after the launch. The user base of XTractor includes scientists from Abbott, AstraZeneca, Bayer Healthcare, BD Technologies, Celera, Cephalon, GSK, JNJ, Novartis, Pfizer, P&G, Pharmadiagnostics, Wyeth, Vertex, US FDA, NIH, NCI, MD Anderson and Harvard Medical School.

XTractor is the only knowledge base that gets updated every day with manually annotated relationships between proteins, drugs, biological process and drugs from the latest PubMed publications.

The literature access also enables search, classification and data sharing at no cost. With its efficient workflows, XTractor combines the speed of a text-mining engine, with the accuracy of a manual annotation.

Going by the response of XTractor, the company is expected to introduce a 'Premium' commercial version of XTractor with enhanced features which includes Bibliographic & Semantic searches. "The knowledgebase currently includes more than 10,0000 relationships, which grows at the rate of more than 600 relationships everyday," said Sapna Y R, senior manager, Business Development, Molecular Connections.

XTractor is highly accurate and more efficient than many of natural language processing (NLP) engines, since it is a hybrid model using technology and manual validation. Since the annotation is highly accurate, researchers would also be able to perform complex queries and retrieve the most complex relations available in literature, which is currently not possible with the conventional NLP systems. Other than this, XTractor acts as a platform for data sharing and categorization. Scientists can share their data with others and even tag data into customized datasets which can be accessible anytime and anywhere.

Molecular Connections is a pioneering in-silico discovery services company. It has powerful tool development, database integration, effective data visualization capabilities, specific expertise in building knowledge bases for rapidly growing needs in, ADME Tox, clinical, drugs, chemistry and patent segments.