INDUSTRY

SAN DIEGO, CA -- GeneFormatics Inc., an innovator in the field of structural proteomics, today announced a collaborative partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (NYSE:BMY) to jointly advance the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) software for the automated, high-throughput determination of 3-D protein structures derived from NMR data. This partnership marks the second agreement between the two companies, and involves a cross-license of the parties' respective analytical NMR software. In July 2000, GeneFormatics and Bristol-Myers Squibb entered into an Alliance Research Agreement to evaluate the biological significance of potential therapeutic targets using GeneFormatics' computational Fuzzy Functional Form(TM) (FFF(TM)) platform technology to elucidate protein function and structure. "We are pleased to continue our work with Bristol-Myers Squibb, as this agreement focuses on further developing our experimental technologies in NMR spectroscopy to expand our robust high-throughput system for target and lead identification," commented John Chiplin, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of GeneFormatics. "This collaboration will be a key to our success as we continue to expand our computational and experimental capabilities and technologies in order to better understand the thousands of new potential drug targets in the human proteome elucidated by recent efforts in DNA sequence genomics." In their new partnership, GeneFormatics and Bristol-Myers Squibb will jointly develop improved NMR software technology to meet the demands that high-throughput drug discovery makes on the process of determining 3-D protein structures from NMR data. Bristol-Myers Squibb will gain access to GeneFormatics' accelerated NMR spectroscopy technology and in return, GeneFormatics will receive rights to Bristol-Myers Squibb's proprietary analytical NMR technology. NMR spectroscopy has long been a powerful tool for gathering information on and characterizing protein structures for the advancement of drug discovery. However, traditional approaches to protein analysis by NMR methods are slow and resource intensive. Automation of NMR data acquisition and analysis using GeneFormatics' proprietary NMR methods and software, AutoAssign(TM) and AutoStructure(TM), developed by Professor Gaetano Montelione of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology at Rutgers University and a co-founder of GeneFormatics, significantly accelerates this process.