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January 23, 2002 Visualization Expertise From AnVil Informatics Prominently Featured in New Book Lowell, MA - AnVil Informatics, Inc., an in silico drug discovery company, announced that CRC Press has released DNA Arrays - Technologies and Experimental Strategies, a book that prominently features the contributions of AnVil's team of scientists, informatics and data visualization specialists, and data miners.

In this book "distinguished investigators from academia and industry provide up-to-date insights into methodological fundamentals of construction of DNA arrays, optimization of hybridization conditions, the use of expression data in bioinformatics, different software tools, and the application of microarray technology for drug discovery process," said publicists from CRC Press.

The book includes a 47-page section on High-Dimensional Visualization Support for Data Mining Gene Expression Data, written by Georges Grinstein, C. Bret Jessee, Patrick Hoffman, Phil O'Neil, and Alexander Gee from AnVil Informatics. The authors provide details of how a large set of data can be mined using radical analytic and visual tools, such as AnVil's own RadViz™ technology. These tools are a valuable component of the total solution that AnVil offers to life sciences companies. AnVil partners with scientists in these companies, enabling them to reduce time in the drug discovery process, as well as improving the precision, validity, and reliability of the results. AnVil's unique technology for data discovery is outlined in the book and is supported by an application example, using the Golub and Slonim dataset for comparison of microarray analytical methods.

The book's cover features two of AnVil's visualization tools. "These visualization techniques display all the data in a compact form to provide an exploratory overview," said John Hotchkiss, AnVil's Chief Technology Officer. "These graphs can display hundreds of data points, each having thousands of attributes or descriptors. Using the findings revealed by these visualization tools, AnVil's biology and chemistry domain experts can typically find not just one answer, but several and provide our partners with supporting materials to enable them to make more informed decisions. This information can empower our partners to identify key disease-related genes, predict toxicology of lead compounds, predict treatment outcome, and reach other business-critical decisions which can lead to commercial opportunities."

Traditional analysis and visualization methods are limited and unable to work with entire complex data sets. Reducing dimensions simplifies the data but can obscure or fail to detect data relationships, leading to a lack of conclusions or incorrect conclusions. AnVil Informatics uses an approach that preserves all the information in the full data set. The book explains that AnVil uses visualizations "not only as a means of portraying the results of analyses, but also as interactive tools for the exploration, manipulation, and analysis of the data and generation of subsequent results."

About AnVil Informatics

AnVil Informatics, Inc. works in partnership with leading life science, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to provide in silico drug discovery services and other integrated solutions that typically include a mix of professional services and custom software tools. AnVil's unique expertise in the application of both analytic and visual methods enables the extraction of a maximum amount of knowledge from the complex data sets involved in the drug discovery process, thereby enhancing every step in the client's decision making process; generating informed decisions faster and more accurately. Additional information can be found at http://www.anvilinfo.com/

Copyright © 2002 AnVil, Inc. All rights reserved.

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