ONTOFORCE announces enhanced functionality in DISQOVER to build cohorts in minutes

Press release

Ghent, Belgium, 2 April 2025 – ONTOFORCE, a leader in semantic technology for the life sciences industry, announced today that their flagship knowledge discovery platform, DISQOVER, will be available with enhanced patient cohort building functionality. This new functionality will help researchers integrate relevant clinical data, build patient cohorts, explore subjects, and conduct cohort analysis faster than ever before.

In the life sciences industry, patient cohorts are built using integrated clinical datasets and enable researchers to conduct efficient hypothesis testing without duplicative efforts. Traditional methods for assembling and integrating clinical data to build cohorts are often time-consuming and complex due to the varied and sensitive nature of the data sources.

To address these challenges, ONTOFORCE has released a suite of improvements to how data is ingested, protected, queried, and analyzed when building cohorts in DISQOVER. These include new features related to data ingestion, security, and filtering. A new Study Data Tabulation Model (SDTM) pipeline is now available out-of-the-box to accelerate data ingestion and time to value. New configuration options allow specific data concepts, such as Subjects or Patients, to have additional protections, obscuring sensitive details during search and exploration. To improve cohort analysis in DISQOVER’s powerful ‘charts’ view, a new chart filter feature allows users to apply different filters side-by-side without needing to update the main query.

“Cohort building is harder than it should be, and too many researchers are struggling with inaccessible, non-harmonized data or unintuitive search tools,” said Valerie Morel, CEO of ONTOFORCE. “At ONTOFORCE, we believe these workflows can - and should - take minutes. Thanks to our latest improvements researchers will save time, gain confidence, and can focus on higher-value tasks. We are constantly evolving DISQOVER to meet real industry needs, and we’re excited to see the value life science companies will unlock from their data as we continue to innovate in the future.”

Leading pharmaceutical companies, such as AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim are already driving success for clinical development with DISQOVER. Learn more about how DISQOVER’s cohort builder is transforming research processes in our upcoming webinar “Cohort building: real-world applications from AstraZeneca & Boehringer Ingelheim.” Register for the webinar now.

Those interested in a demo can schedule a time to meet with an ONTOFORCE team member here. For Bio-IT World attendees in Boston 2-4 April, stop by booth #325 to learn more about the use case and to receive a demo.

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About ONTOFORCE

ONTOFORCE helps life sciences organizations accelerate research and drug development by unlocking hidden insights from data. Founded on semantic technology and an ontology-based knowledge graph, their flagship product, DISQOVER, is a knowledge discovery platform developed specifically for the life sciences industry. DISQOVER seamlessly connects an organization’s internal, siloed data with licensed data and public data in one easy-to-use, customizable platform.       

DISQOVER is deployed by many leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Users include scientific researchers, bioinformaticians, data scientists, and many other roles.    

ONTOFORCE is headquartered in Ghent, Belgium and has a secondary office in the United States in Cambridge, Massachusetts.