BOSTON, Aug. 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Enlight Biosciences LLC today announced that its newest portfolio company, Knode, has formed strategic partnerships with AstraZeneca and other industry and academic partners. As an Enlight partner, AstraZeneca will collaborate in the development of KNODE’s innovative web-based solution for providing a comprehensive view of life science experts and their work.
“Faced with a vast body of scientific information, we expect KNODE will provide an efficient platform to access and mine a broad range of data to identify expert sources across topics and relationships that provide our R&D scientists unique insight into emerging science and opportunities,” said John Reynders, Vice President, R&D Information at AstraZeneca.
According to David Steinberg, KNODE’s CEO, “KNODE is preparing to launch a dynamic and automated search platform to help individual researchers, academic institutions and companies to discover new connections to foster community and the exchange of scientific knowledge within and beyond their organizations. It’s a next generation networking platform, connecting you with the right experts at the right time.”
“The creation of KNODE emerged from Enlight’s unique understanding of the challenges faced by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Enlight’s Chief Business Officer, Baruch Harris, Ph.D. “We are excited to be working with AstraZeneca and our other pharma partners to further develop and apply KNODE’S unique approach to defining scientific expertise and provide our partners with a clear view of the R&D landscape.”
Enlight was created by PureTech Ventures in partnership with major pharmaceutical companies and academic luminaries to proactively address critical unmet industry needs. Enlight has publicly announced the formation of two other companies in addition to KNODE Entrega and Endra. Entrega is developing a proprietary delivery technology to enable the oral administration of proteins, peptides and difficult-to-deliver small molecules. Endra has commercialized a breakthrough preclinical imaging technology that combines the properties of light-based (optical) imaging with ultrasound to enable advanced live-animal imaging for preclinical research.
About KNODE
KNODE’s web-based life science solution provides a comprehensive view of experts and their content. KNODE is working with some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and researchers to foster the critical network connections that make teams successful. Combining advanced semantic and topic extraction algorithms and a deep biomedical domain expertise, KNODE’s solutions address some of the toughest problems of scientific communication and knowledge sharing.
About Enlight
Enlight is a unique entrepreneurial partnership with major pharmaceutical companies and leading academics, focused on pioneering breakthrough innovations for drug discovery and development. Our partners are able to foster the development of high impact enabling technologies and platforms and focus their investment into the innovations that will directly address their most pressing common needs. Enlight was co-founded by PureTech Ventures and academic luminaries led by Dr. H. Robert Horvitz, Enlight’s SAB Chair, Nobel Laureate, Howard Hughes Investigator, and Koch Professor of Biology at MIT; Dr. Sam Gambhir, Chair of the Department of Radiology and Chief of the Division of Nuclear Medicine, Stanford; Dr. Rakesh Jain, Cook Professor of Tumor Biology at MGH and Harvard Medical School; and Dr. Raju Kucherlapati, Cabot Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Millennium and Abgenix. Enlight’s team also includes an experienced senior pharmaceutical executive, Dr. Bennett Shapiro, PureTech Ventures Senior Partner, former Executive Vice President of Basic Research and Worldwide Licensing at Merck & Co., Inc.
About AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business with a primary focus on the discovery, development and commercialization of prescription medicines for gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, neuroscience, respiratory and inflammation, oncology and infectious disease. AstraZeneca operates in over 100 countries and its innovative medicines are used by millions of patients worldwide. For more information please visit: www.astrazeneca.com.
SOURCE Enlight Biosciences LLC
