Bioinformatics major Strand Genomics has launched 'Soochika' a new knowledge management tool for accelerating the productivity in the field of drug discovery process. The product is specifically targeted to the micro array market.

The new management tool is a cross vertical product applicable across many domains such as micro array analysis, clinical data analysis, protein structure analysis, ADME, sequence analysis and mass spectrometry.

"Soochika which means needle in Sanskrit will help to cull out biologically relevant knowledge from large amounts of data akin to finding a needle in the hay stack," says the company sources.

The company has released the Version 1 of Soochika, which will be applied to micro array vertical. The novel tool will allow researchers and scientists in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry as well as university research labs to analyse complex micro-array data and infer trends in gene expression. It further allows them to understand the complex gene regulatory networks, which facilitates insights into how the biological processes in the body function. Soochika also contains core engine comprised of proprietary as well as public algorithms is portable across many platforms and consists of a bench-scientist-friendly graphical user interface.

According the company, Soochika micro array was built in a record time of four months and currently scientists and engineers at Strand are building out Soochika across other vertical domains as well. Since it is a multi licensing model, the pricing of individual units would be different according to its scalability.

On the marketing strategy of Soochika, Strand team said that there was a pre-marketing plan, which helped to evaluate the customer base. The product has been of great interest by the biotech-pharma companies and universities in the US, they informed.

Strand is a spin-off of the prestigious Indian Institute of Science and was incepted in November 2000. The company's business model is a combination of being a high-end services provider and building out a suite of products called Oyster and Sphatika, software for image classification on an exclusive to San Diego based Syrrx, a leader in throughput X-ray Crystallography space.