Contact: Susanne Thiele Halchtersche Strasse 33 38304 Wolfenbüttel (Germany)
Press Release
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April 1, 2004
BIOBASE: First Release of TRANSPATH®-NetPro™, the Database of Biological Networks
Wolfenbüttel/Germany. BIOBASE, the leading content provider of biological databases, announces today that the new TRANSPATH®-NetPro™ release, the largest worldwide expert curated database of molecular regulation mechanisms in human and mammalian cells, is now available. The young and innovative life science company BIOBASE has been working within a scientific cooperation on the integration of the protein-protein database NetPro™ from Molecular Connections (Bangalore, India) into the renowned BIOBASE database TRANSPATH® since 2003. “The newly developed, high-quality signal network database TRANSPATH®-NetPro™ is up to the standard of customers from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology area for more complex information about biological networks, so as to more quickly and cost-effectively identify drugs that affect the target molecule of certain diseases and to avoid unintentional side effects or toxicity”, said Michael Tysiak, CEO of BIOBASE. “TRANSPATH, our own database for analysis of biological networks and gene expression arrays and for identification of potential key molecules in signal networks, was enlarged with NetPro™, one of the most comprehensive information bases of protein-protein-interactions”, stated Prof. Dr. Edgar Wingender, CSO of BIOBASE. “With this new release, our customers have access to information about 45,000 validated protein-protein-interactions from more than 16,000 publications, 21,000 proteins, more than 135,000 cross relations to other databases, as well as additional details about cellular localizations, biological metabolism pathways, species, experimental techniques, and diseases”, he explained. The TRANSPATH®-NetPro™ database features a very high quality standard compared to automatically generated databases. The biomedical information is manually extracted from the primary literature and is subject to strict quality management by molecular biological experts and highly qualified bioinformatics scientists. TRANSPATH®-NetPro™ TRANSPATH®-NetPro™ can be used as an encyclopedia, for general or specific information about signal transduction, for analysis of biological networks and gene expression data, as well as for searching for target molecules of new agents. The database contains, in addition to information about human and mammalian cells, the tools PathwayBuilder™ for visualization of networks and ArrayAnalyzer™ for interpretation of gene expression arrays and for identification of key molecules in signal networks as possible drug targets. A complete, step-by-step pathway reconstruction from ligand to the regulated gene is possible by linking to the TRANSFAC® database (transcription regulation, www.transfac.de). BIOBASE GmbH (www.biobase.de) BIOBASE was founded in 1997 from the bioinformatics research group of the German Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF), Brunswick. The company distributes worldwide licenses for in-house developed molecular biological databases and is also active as a distributor for in-licensed databases. So far, over 50 major biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies worldwide and more than 150 universities and academic institutes are satisfied customers of the company.