October/November 2000, Vol. 17, No. 10 & 11 geneticXchange and Stanford Team up: University to employ innovative PharmacoGenetic Knowledge Base GeneticXchange, (Menlo Park, Calif.; www.geneticxchange.com), a bioinformatics software company, has entered into a collaboration agreement with Stanford University to enhance the data acquisition, integration and transformation capabilities of the PharmacoGenetics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB, http://pharmgkb.org). Stanford researchers are developing PharmGKB as part of a nationwide collaboration with medical centers throughout the United States. The knowledge base will be an integrated data resource funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The purpose of this project is to aid researchers in understanding how genetic variation among individuals contributes to different responses to drugs. The knowledge base inter-links genomic, molecular, cellular and clinical information about gene systems important for modulating drug responses. This knowledge base is the first to integrate all disciplines of the discovery process. "Our goal is to build the GenBank for the 21st century," said Russ Altman, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine and computer science and the principal investigator on the project. "We had to establish an open technology architecture that is capable of accommodating massive amounts of diverse and complex data that are inherent with PharmGKB. That is why we are excited about our relationship with geneticXchange because it should help us to realize our goal." He is working with Teri Klein, PhD, senior research scientist and project director at Stanford, to lead the team designing and implementing the knowledge base. "We are very pleased to collaborate with Stanford and be an important enabling technology for such a significant endeavor," said Su Yun Chung , PhD, chief computational biologist for geneticXchange. "PharmaGKB is the true test bed for the future of drug discovery and will change the way medicine is practiced." GeneticXchange is a pioneer of genetic enterprise application integration leading the convergence of mainstream information technology with discovery biology. Table of Contents Web Site © Copyright 2000 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 2555 Cumberland Parkway, Suite 299, Atlanta, GA 30339 USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com Web: www.lionheartpub.com