Informatics

As the quantities of data generated by today's biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries increase exponentially, information management and analysis have become daunting research challenges in their own right. Informatics specialists at the Merck Frosst Centre for Therapeutic Research are rising to the challenge with world-class software engineering approaches to data management.

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The Basic Research Informatics development group at the Kirkland site follows a sound object-oriented, iterative software engineering approach, focussing on two key areas: data analysis and data visualization.

The team develops mainly with C++ and Java, and some Visual Basic. All development efforts employ object-oriented technology, with extensive use of the latest design pattern and state-of-the-art development tools. To support the drug research programs, data analysis tools are developed in partnership with the laboratory researchers and academic institutes.

The team's other area of expertise is in data visualization, working in the emerging area of business intelligence: pattern recognition, text mining, data mining and curve analysis. Software tools designed by the Informatics department at Merck Frosst allow researchers to interface interactive visualization of large datasets with multiple databases of existing chemical structures, to find the matching pieces of the complex drug discovery puzzle.