Annai Systems And Thoughtworks Develop Evidence Engine For The Clearity Foundation To Individualize Options For Treatment Of Ovarian Cancer

SAN DIEGO and LOS GATOS, Calif., Nov. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Clearity Foundation (Clearity) and Annai Systems today announced the implementation of a software-driven system (the MedTrust Evidence Engine-E2) that supports Clearity's mission to individualize treatment options for ovarian cancer patients.  As a result, Clearity is now more efficiently integrating and interpreting data from many sources, including its Diane Barton Database of more than 250 tumor profiles, enabling it to respond to more women who need help in personalizing treatment for their recurrent ovarian cancer.  The Med-Trust E2 system was developed by Annai in close collaboration with ThoughtWorks, a global company wholly devoted to the art and science of software development.

Ovarian cancer survival has not improved significantly in decades, largely because of a trial-and-error approach to treating cancer recurrence.  It is now known that ovarian cancer is a heterogeneous disease, and tumors have significantly different characteristics from one patient to the next.  While DNA sequencing, gene expression analysis and other technologies have increasingly made it possible to develop molecular profiles of individual tumors, integrating and interpreting this data and extracting the implications of these profiles for personalized patient care are challenging.  The Clearity Foundation has developed a pro bono service to help patients and their physicians overcome these challenges and to enable more informed decisions about treatment options.  Annai's E2 has automated key steps in the process used by Clearity to deliver this service.  "Clearity can now more efficiently create tumor profiles for our patients and identify personalized treatment options," said Dr. Deborah Zajchowski, Clearity's Scientific Director.   

Hosted by Annai, the MedTrust E2 software system is capable of drawing upon the scientific literature, a wide variety of databases and the hands-on experience of health care professionals to distill "lines of evidence" bearing on the feasibility of alternative drug therapies for specific patients on the basis of the molecular profiles of individual tumors.  "The unique strength of the MedTrust-E2 system lies in its extraordinary flexibility for absorbing the contents of very many, highly heterogeneous data bases and by the ease with which it can link data and concepts from one environment to those in another," said Dan Maltbie, Annai's Chief Technology Officer.  "E2 is also distinguished by being an evidence-driven, rather than a rule-driven engine—making it a true learning system."

Over the past year, Annai and ThoughtWorks have each invested significant resources in the development of MedTrust E2, an initial version of which is presently being provided to Clearity without charge.  "What has motivated our investments in this project," said ThoughtWorks Founder and Chairman Neville Roy Singham, "is our fervent hope and conviction that E2 will permit The Clearity Foundation to bring its unique brand of support to far more women than would otherwise have been possible."

"We are grateful to Annai and Medtrust for their support of our mission to reach more women and strive to improve their quality of life and survival in the face of this very difficult-to-treat cancer," said Hillary Theakston, Clearity's Executive Director. 

About ThoughtWorks

ThoughtWorks - the custom software experts. A company wholly devoted to the art and science of custom software. We make it, and we make our clients better at it. Our bottom line is to design and deliver software fast and predictably. Doing enterprise-scale software is tough, but the returns to those organizations that can deliver - on target - are tremendous. ThoughtWorks' products division, ThoughtWorks Studios, offers tools to manage the entire Agile development lifecycle through its Adaptive ALM(TM) solution, comprised of Mingle®, Go(TM) and Twist®. ThoughtWorks employs 2,100 professionals to serve clients from offices in Africa, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.

About The Clearity Foundation

The Clearity Foundation is the only 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to helping ovarian cancer patients make more informed treatment decisions with personalized diagnostic information. Every year, more than 14,000 women die of ovarian cancer and approximately 21,000 are newly-diagnosed. When a patient's ovarian cancer returns after standard chemotherapy, a chance for a cure is less than 15%, or less than 3% if she did not respond to initial treatment. Ovarian cancer survivor and scientist Dr. Laura Shawver, established The Clearity Foundation to prioritize treatment options for ovarian cancer patients and change the trial-and-error approach.  Visit www.clearityfoundation.org to learn how you can help ovarian cancer patients improve their quality of life and live longer.

About Annai Systems

Annai Systems, Inc. located in California's Silicon Valley, is a private company that develops and commercializes high-performance network solutions to support the collaborative needs and workflows of genomic research and medicine, including GNOS™—Annai's Genomics Network Operating System managing data from major initiatives of the National Cancer Institute in the 5 petabyte repository, CGHub, at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Earlier this year, Annai announced that it had completed the acquisition of MedTrust Online LLC—the world's largest on-line community of oncologists. www.annaisystems.com

SOURCE ThoughtWorks