Nowadays, most applications used for searching biomedical literatures are based on keyword technology, which is more than half a century old approach. Quertle, a leading AI-based analytics company, recognized that adding more bells and whistles on top of that old technology could never suffice. Quertle understood that artificial intelligence could revolutionize literature searches and grow as needed in the future. The company approached this problem from the perspective of biomedical industry experts, who know a great deal about data science and programming.
Inspiring Leaders behind Quertle: A Tale of Researchers
Dr. Jeffrey Saffer and Dr. Vicki Burnett are the Founders of Quertle. Both are long-time biomedical researchers who had been personally frustrated by the inefficiencies of finding critical information in the biomedical literature. They understood the importance of that literature to R&D (80% of potential drug targets are identified from the historical literature), to business decisions such as Publication Planning and Medical Affairs, and to healthcare itself. Thus, they were motivated to establish Quertle in order to re-invent the approaches for using biomedical literature and transform that process from frustration to fruitful discovery.
Jeff and Vicki took some time to execute their vision, but it eventually led to a unique approach that has been validated by the use of their solutions by pharmaceutical and biotech companies, universities and research institutions, and practicing physicians around the world – covering 192 countries.
Mission to deliver the Best in Class Services
Quertle is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) solutions company dedicated for research and discovery from textual biomedical information. Biomedical literature is the backbone of drug discovery and provides a scientific foundation for the entire healthcare industry. Searching this vast and constantly growing literature corpus is fundamental to the work of every pharmaceutical & biotech company, hospital, and physician and biomedical & life science research institution. Arising from more than a decade of research by scientific experts in the field, Quertle uses machine learning, conceptual understanding, and predictive visual analytics to transform literature discovery from a slow, agonizing process to faster development of new therapies – minimizing costly research mistakes, making better business decisions and improving physician awareness.
The Greatest Projects
Central to Quertle’s success was the building of an entirely new foundation for discovery from textual content – the BioAI™ platform. Starting with simple natural language processing and then evolving into a fully fledged AI approach, capable of learning directly from the text encountered, the BioAI platform is adaptable and extensible, supporting unparalleled discovery as well as integration into pharmaceutical workflows.
Quertle offers its powerful solution via Qinsight™, a Software as a Service application, which covers biomedical journal articles, patent grants and applications, treatment protocols, NIH grant applications, and many other sources for comprehensive discovery. Soon to be included is the Factiva news from Dow Jones, full-text books and articles from Oxford University Press and more. Also, Quertle creates custom applications to incorporate additional visual analytics, other content sources such as proprietary in-house documents or healthcare records, and other custom features.
Quertle’s Unique Strategies to Compete in the Global Market
The key to sales of Quertle’s products is that the pharmaceutical industry is finally recognizing the inadequacy of old-fashioned search methods. Hence, Quertle’s strategy is to make the industry aware of its fully-functional AI solution that can be put to work immediately. As a part of this, Quertle makes the following three points.
- Quertle’s AI methods minimize the risk of missing critical information: The investments in pharmaceutical projects are huge. Yet, realizing – after the fact – that previously known information would have changed project decisions still remains a commonplace occurrence. Supplementing current discovery methods with Quertle’s unique approaches can significantly reduce the money wasted on these projects.
- The time required to discover that critical information is considerably shortened: For example, one user reported finding out in minutes what previously took an entire team a full month. This is possible by combining Qinsight’s AI discovery with the intuitive predictive visual analytics.
- Quertle’s approach inherently supports serendipity: Literature searching, by its nature, is geared towards finding out what you are looking for, and the critical associated information is often lost. Quertle’s AI automatically discovers related concepts and presents these in an intuitive exploratory framework, enabling users to have those critical moments.
Success Attributes towards their Greatest Accomplishments
Quertle’s success stems from its unique approach, built on recognition that incremental improvements to outdated approaches could never solve today’s literature discovery problems. Gaining worldwide awareness and acceptance of its methods, and the ensuing impact the technology has had on pharmaceutical discovery and in saving lives, has been Quertle’s most significant accomplishment.
Successful Customers, Successful Business
Quertle is growing its customer base through active support of users. The company understands the industry needs, and communicates with customers as scientist to scientist. Also, Quertle provides free training and support with all site licenses.
Future Aspects
Initially, Quertle’s biggest challenge in the pharmaceutical industry’s use of textual information was getting individual users to recognize that the frustrations they feel with standard approaches are indeed solvable. There is, fortunately, increasing awareness that AI can help and that Quertle’s AI, which learns directly from the meaningful text in the documents, is the future.
The best part of Quertle is imagination – defining a problem and building a solution, without constraint to prior biases. This imagination extends through Quertle’s entire team and is a core value.
