Strand Genomics, the life sciences informatics company has entered into a distributor agreement with UBI, Canada for its product Acuris, a tool to automate gene and protein annotation and literature curation.

Acuris is an enterprise-wide tool for the automated annotation and management of gene-related data. Acuris gathers, parses, persists and presents gene-related public information and curated literature from virtually any public or private source in order to manage collaborative discovery processes.

According to Lindsay Moir, president of UBI, "Imagine, a researcher or company spending months if not years on an experimental track, only to find that somebody else in the world had already done that experiment, wrote the paper, and patented the methods. Acuris provides researchers an automated information gathering technology so they can invest their time doing leading edge research and thus avoid these types of unfortunate circumstances."

"Acuris has increased customer research productivity multifold, resulting in significant cost savings", said Todd Laird, senior vice president, business development, Strand Genomics. "UBI is the leading distributor in Canada for bioinformatics and our relationship will deliver real value to the research community there".

The Bangalore-based Strand Genomics is focused on software for drug discovery and development. It has leveraged its strengths in data mining and analysis, knowledge management and workflow processes to develop its products Avadis for data analysis and visualization and Acuris for automated curation, annotation and collaboration.

The three-year-old, UBI is the only Canadian company that specializes in the distribution of bioinformatics software. The company focuses on addressing its customers' needs and where appropriate provides training, integration and consulting services.