Bio-pharmaceutical organizations are today challenged with finding ways of profitably managing prodigious genomic data emerging from digitized and highly automated laboratory process. There exist points along any discovery pipeline at which it is necessary to rapidly cull out pharmaceutically or otherwise significant genes from a much larger candidate pool. acuris, a research accelerator tool for gene annotation, offers one solution to any life science organization in the early stages of a discovery program.

acuris contains two components. The first component, algorithmic annotation, is a framework through which publicly available information associated with any particular gene can be automatically gathered, persisted and presented to end users. Scientists can submit potentially interesting gene sequences to the application, and acuris interrogates these against a range of industry-standard databases/algorithms and a range of publicly accessible data sources on the Internet from which the results (annotations) are extracted, compiled and persisted into a local relational database. Scientists are then able to query the local database and visualize the information gathered about the targeted genes.

The second component in acuris, literature annotation, is a framework for managing scientific literature. Research papers, citations and patent documents from various industry sources are critical resources for deeper investigation into targeted genes. acuris allows scientists to directly download, categorize, persist and manually annotate a range of document types. Adapters for various document types and information sources have been implemented. Document sources include public and password-protected Internet sites as well as papers uploaded from the user's desktop and can be extended by creating the required adapter. The framework supports versioning and allows users to trace through a chronology of additions and annotations. When deployed across an enterprise, this framework enables scientists to share expertise and insights, thereby reducing the need for overlapping investigations.