SCIENCE

BLUE BELL, PA -- Locus Discovery Inc., a new computational drug design biopharmaceutical company, announced today that the Company has moved into a newly designed, state-of-the-art facility in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. At this new facility, Locus has assembled what it believes is one of the fastest parallel processor supercomputer clusters in the world, based on data from the TFCC (Top 500 Computer Clusters). The Company is using its supercomputer for proprietary computational drug design work. Locus Discovery Supercomputer Cluster Most current supercomputers are comprised of a large number of smaller processors linked in parallel, a form of distributed computing, rather than previous approaches that often used a single large centralized processor. Locus has assembled a Beowulf supercomputer cluster currently comprised of 1,408 1GHz parallel processors. The majority of the processors are 1U, 1 GHz dual processor, Pentium III units purchased from Western Scientific. The Locus Discovery cluster has a peak performance of approximately 1.41 TeraFlops. A GigaFlop is a standard unit of computer speed and represents 1 billion calculations per second; a TeraFlop is equivalent to 1,000 GigaFlops, that is, 1 trillion calculations per second. At 1.41 TeraFlops, the Locus supercluster is capable of conducting over 1.4 trillion calculations per second, which the Company believes is about 40% faster than the next most powerful publicly known supercluster. Locus Discovery also owns an additional supercluster comprised of 658 1 GHz processors operating in another location. Within the next few weeks the Company will bring these processors to its Blue Bell site, and expand the total supercluster to 2,066 1 GHz processors. This cluster configuration will have a peak performance of 2.06 TeraFlops — over 2 trillion calculations per second - or approximately twice that of the next most powerful supercluster currently listed on the TFCC database. Superclusters are monitored by the TFCC, an international forum that promotes cluster computing research and education. It participates in helping to set up and promote technical standards in this area and to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. To achieve this, the TFCC twice a year assembles a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems. The TFCC presents a list of computer clusters on their website, http://clusters.top500.org. "As impressive as our computer is, the key to our capabilities are the novel and proprietary mathematical constructs and computational algorithms which run on the supercluster. We are committed to developing the best possible tools to progress our novel work in finding new drugs for a variety of serious medical disorders. We are proud of the hard work and achievements of our team in building this supercomputer cluster. This powerful computer is instrumental to our groundbreaking work in computational drug design, with which we hope to achieve in weeks what currently takes many years of painstaking laboratory research," commented Nicholas Landekic, President and Chief Executive Officer of Locus Discovery. Move to New Facility Locus Discovery, growing at a rapid rate, expects to have approximately 50 employees by the end of this year and about 80 by the end of 2002. Within the next few years, Locus plans to employ well over a hundred people at its new facility, including chemists, biologists, computer scientists, and business professionals. The new 50,000 square foot facility can accommodate the projected employee growth and future requirements for additional laboratory and supercomputer space. Locus Discovery's computational technology is a proprietary means of first rapidly and accurately identifying the biologically relevant active binding site of a protein, and then designing small molecule antagonists or agonists of the protein's activity. The technology utilizes proprietary computational procedures and requires knowledge only of the structure of a protein. Unlike traditional research approaches, the Locus Discovery process represents the ability to compress into a few weeks what previously took several years in the drug discovery process, enabling the identification of small molecule drugs substantially faster, with a much higher success rate, and on a much larger scale than has previously been possible. "The new facility not only allows for continued long-term growth but significant expansion of our drug discovery efforts. We expect to have 20 drug discovery programs underway by year's end, which would represent unprecedented productivity and efficiency in the biopharmaceutical industry", commented Nicholas Landekic. Locus Discovery is a new computational drug design biopharmaceutical company. The Company was organized in September 1999, and is based on technology exclusively licensed from the Sarnoff Corporation. The Locus Discovery process can be used to discover therapeutic compounds for many thousands of known protein targets, as well as thousands of new protein targets being identified through genomic research. Some of Locus Discovery's drug discovery programs include small molecule mimetics of erythropoietin, anti-viral compounds based on a novel target called GP41, and other programs in cancer, infectious diseases, and neurological and other disorders.