Ayasdi Partners With IMI's U-BIOPRED Consortium to Help Patients With Severe Asthma

MENLO PARK, CA and BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Apr 29, 2014) - -- Bio-IT -- Ayasdi (www.ayasdi.com) today announced that it has partnered with Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI)'s Unbiased Biomarkers for the Prediction of Respiratory Disease Outcomes (U-BIOPRED) initiative to find new insights to ensure better outcomes for patients with severe asthma. Key members of the U-BIOPRED consortium -- including 20 academic institutions, 10 biopharma industry partners (EFPIA), 6 patient organizations, 4 other organizations -- will now have access to the Ayasdi Cure application. Ayasdi Cure, based on Ayasdi's award-winning machine learning platform, merges hundreds of algorithms with Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and obviates the need for queries or coding.

"We are thrilled to collaborate with Ayasdi to offer Ayasdi Cure to key member organizations as it is completely unique from all of the other advanced analytics tools that we have used," said Anthony Rowe, Principal Scientist of External Innovation at Johnson & Johnson and the Chair of U-BIOPRED's analytics working group. "With Ayasdi's help, we believe that we'll accelerate the development of therapies for asthma by identifying more precise patient sub-populations that will lead to better patient outcomes."

U-BIOPRED originally became aware of Ayasdi from the work that was being done with Ayasdi at the University of Southampton, a U-BIOPRED member organization.

"We began working with Ayasdi a year ago and the results have been remarkable," said Dr. Ratko Djukanovic, Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the Southampton University Faculty of Medicine and Director of the NIHR Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit in Southampton, United Kingdom. "The fact that Ayasdi Cure is so easy to use and allows analysis of large and very complex data in a flexible way makes it an ideal tool for us. Now that Ayasdi Cure is available to key members of the consortium, I am looking forward to even more breakthroughs that have a direct and positive impact on severe asthma patients in Europe and beyond."

"U-BIOPRED members have large amounts of very complex multi-data on severe asthma that makes it extremely difficult for researchers to discover the right insights in a timely manner," said Pek Lum, Chief Data Scientist and VP of Solutions at Ayasdi. "Ayasdi Cure not only visualizes relevant relationships among a large amount of data points, it is also easy for the people that are most deeply familiar with the problem set -- scientists, biologists, drug developers, doctors -- to explore the data themselves. This opens up tremendous possibilities on a much faster timeline than ever before."

Separately, Ayasdi also announced today Ayasdi Cure and partnerships with Intel and CLC-Bio. To read more, click here.

About IMI
The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is the world's largest public-private partnership in health. IMI is improving the environment for pharmaceutical innovation in Europe by engaging and supporting networks of industrial and academic experts in collaborative research projects. The European Union contributes EUR 1 billion to the IMI research programme, and this is matched by in kind contributions worth at least another EUR 1 billion from the member companies of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). The Innovative Medicines Initiative currently supports 46 projects, many of which are already producing impressive results. The projects are all working to address the biggest challenges in drug development, with the goal of accelerating the development of safer and more effective treatments for patients. More info on IMI: www.imi.europa.eu. Follow us on Twitter: @IMI_JU

About Ayasdi
Ayasdi is transforming how the world uses data to solve complex problems by automatically discovering and operationalizing insights from complex datasets. Founded in 2008 after a decade of DARPA and NSF funded research at Stanford, the Ayasdi Platform executes and merges the results of hundreds of machine learning algorithms using Topological Data Analysis (TDA), enabling users to explore their data within interactive and intuitive applications. Funded by Khosla Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, GE Ventures, Citi Ventures, and FLOODGATE, Ayasdi's customers include General Electric, Citigroup, Anadarko, Boehringer Ingelheim, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and Mount Sinai Hospital. To learn more, visit www.ayasdi.com or follow us @ayasdi.

Ayasdi helps the world's biggest and most sophisticated organizations discover breakthroughs that change how we all live and work. People who share this passion can view Ayasdi career opportunities here.