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ST. LOUIS and AUSTIN, TX - Tripos, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRPS), a leading provider of drug discovery informatics products and chemistry research, and United Devices, the market leader in secure grid solutions, today announced plans to grid-enable Tripos' virtual screening applications to operate on United Devices' grid computing platform. "This collaboration is a major step forward for the life sciences community," said Amith Viswanath, industry manager, Healthcare and Life Sciences IT at Frost and Sullivan. "More and more companies are recognizing that end user applications must become merged with a grid middleware backbone to drive the next generation of research. The main end result of such convergence is a significant increase in research scope, greater data access capabilities across the enterprise and a reduction in overall workflow costs." Tripos combines information technology and scientific research to optimize and accelerate its customers' molecular research for new drug discovery. Its customers include the majority of the world's pharmaceutical companies. "As a leading provider of discovery software products and services and chemistry research to the life science industries, we have spent the past two decades staying ahead of the technology curve to better serve our customers," said Edward Hodgkin, Tripos vice president of marketing and business development. "This alliance with United Devices is another way in which we are meeting industry needs." "It is exciting to couple the proven scientific benefits of Tripos' software with the speed and scope of research attainable on a grid platform," said Paul Kirchoff, United Devices' vice president of marketing and business development. "Both companies are eager to respond to this growing customer need." They will work together to port *FlexX, *FlexX-Pharm and *FlexE, programs that allow virtual screening of compound databases by rapidly docking flexible ligands at active sites, and Unity 3DTM software that provides fast, conformationally flexible 3-D searching of chemical databases to United Devices' Grid MPTM platform. This collaboration will offer scientists even more applications to run on their enterprise or on-demand grids. United Devices Grid MPTM Enterprise platform is currently being used by companies such as Novartis and Sanofi-Synthelabo to accelerate and define drug discovery as well as by researchers at the University of Purdue and the University of Texas to harness the latent power of existing compute resources.