ALAMEDA, Calif.– LifeMap Sciences, Inc., a subsidiary of BioTime, Inc., announced today the release of MalaCards, Version 1.04. The new release is available at https://www.malacards.org. MalaCards is a new database of human diseases and their annotations that is modeled on the architecture and richness of the popular GeneCards® database of human genes (https://www.genecards.org). LifeMap Sciences holds the exclusive worldwide license to marketMalaCards from Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd., the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

MalaCards 1.04 includes several new features and improvements. This includes the introduction of data from OrphaNet and NCBI BioSystems; a new algorithm for affiliating and ranking genes to diseases; classification of diseases using the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10); improvement of disease search via the addition of hit-context; the addition of disease DNA variations related to disease, and the introduction of research reagents.

“I was delighted to have an opportunity to present this new MalaCards version at a session I headed on ‘Disease Bioinformatics’ at the conference of the International Society for Computational Biology in Berlin last July. It was an excellent opportunity to compare notes with other scientists in this realm,” said Professor Doron Lancet, Ph.D., Head of the Crown Human Genome Center, at the Weizmann Institute of Science and principal investigator of MalaCards.

“We continue to see improvement of MalaCards’ features and content, including the addition of research reagents,” stated Yaron Guan-Golan, Head of Marketing at LifeMap Sciences. “Further, the addition of classification via ICD-10 and DOID addresses an important need in the industry for standardization and allows for seamless integration with existing enterprise software.”