Melax Tech to Create COVID-19 Dataset Knowledge Graph for National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health has awarded Melax Technologies a $300,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I contract to develop and enhance user-focused informatics tools that will be used for infectious, immune and allergic disease research.

Melax Tech will work with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of Californa San Diego to develop a COVID-19 dataset knowledge graph, which will be used to analyze heterogeneous COVID-19 datasets. The volume and diversity of coronavirus-related data currently make it hard for scientists to find and use relevant datasets for their research, Melax Tech said.

According to Jingcheng Du, director of natural language processing research at Melax Tech, the COVID-DKG will be able to support semantic search, visualization and online analysis and back coronavirus response efforts.

Peter Rose, the lead official of San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Bioinformatics and Biomedical Applications, shared that solutions like COVID-DKG could give researchers new insights into the virus by combining pieces of information from different sources.

Melax Tech allows businesses, laboratories and life sciences organizations to use NLP technologies to unlock unstructured textual data. It offers artificial intelligence-powered software to improve decision-making and research capabilities. Some of its clients are the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The company is headquartered in Houston.