BioMedExperts, a new niche social networking site, hopes to help lab-locked biomedical experts connect globally with other researchers in their field.

Designed by Columbia, South Carolina-based Collexis Holdings, BioMedExperts plans to launch Friday. The site hopes to leverage the power of online professional networks to promote collaborative medical research and development among scientists around the world.

When researchers log into the site, they immediately see a list of their publications, areas of expertise, and a preliminary social network culled from their co-authors.

“Just about anybody who has written anything in a peer-reviewed journal in the past ten years worldwide is in the system,” said Collexis Holdings CEO Bill Kirkland.

Although the site is launching with 20,000 active users, it is pre-populated with 1.4 million profiles and 12 million network connections from more than 150 countries. “It’s the Kevin Bacon rule. If you’ve published, you’re connected to everyone,” said Mr. Kirkland.

The site allows health care and life science professionals to quickly see who else is working in their area of expertise, their institutional affiliation, where they are located, and what research papers they have published. In addition to viewing potential contacts, researchers can conduct grant and publication searches on the site as well.

According to industry analysts, social networks have become an alternative to search engines. However, given the abundance of social media information that currently exists, developers are now returning to search in order “to make sense of the information more quickly,” said analyst John Blossom, president of Shore Communications.

As powerful as Facebook and LinkedIn are, both sites’ keyword and tag searches are “too crude” to quickly find specific affinities, said Mr. Blossom. Collexis’ technology allows people to drill down quickly to “see who is doing what and with whom.”

At the University of South Carolina, Collexis’ expert profile system (a precursor to BioMedExperts) helped an Alzheimer researcher discover that a cancer researcher on campus was looking at the same gene pathway. "I don’t think they’d ever have thought to talk to each other," said Rose Booze, associate professor for research at the University of South Carolina. "Surprising connections can be made."

The network is an outgrowth of the company’s core business—enterprise-level “discovery” software. Collexis’ software aims to make search results more relevant by taking documents from various databases and pulling out key ideas and applying weight to them. COO Stephen Leicht equates the process to a high-tech version of highlighting important information in a college text book. Collexis used this semantic search technology to extract bibliographic information from Medline’s vast database to create the BioMedExperts network.

“There’s Google, and then there’s a 150 companies trying to be like Google,” said Mr. Kirkland. “We decided the best route was to build applications on top of our search technology.”     

In addition to ad revenue, Collexis, which counts the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard among its clients, plans to market its technology to institutions with large directories.

The company is looking at ways to apply the application to other academic disciplines as well. “This approach is by no means limited to the biosciences,” said Mr. Kirkland.

Dell has partnered with Collexis in launching the site. The two companies also plan to develop configurations that will allow researchers within large pharmaceutical companies to use the networking and search technology behind their firewall. Additionally, they will begin working together on hardware standards for the biological arena that will be offered though BioMedExperts.

Dell believes the site’s networking ability could aid in drug discovery. "The problem with some pharmaceutical companies is that don’t know what’s going on behind their own walls," said James Coffin, vice president and general manager, Dell Health Care and Life Sciences.