Press Releases [2003]
GENEGO NAMES CHARLES R. CANTOR, PH.D., TO SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD St. Joseph, Michigan, December 15, 2003 - GeneGo today announced the appointment of Charles R.Cantor, Ph.D. to its Scientific Advisory Board. A world-renowned scientist, Dr. Cantor has authored over 360 peer reviewed articles, the first textbook on genomics Genomics: The Science and Technology of the Human Genome Project, co-authored a three volume textbook on Biophysical Chemistry, and been granted 54 patents. "I'm pleased to serve on GeneGo's scientific advisory board," said Dr. Cantor. "GeneGo's computational platform technology will enable researchers to integrate information from several sources and efficiently analyze it for a clearer understanding of disease mechanics." "We are delighted to welcome Dr. Cantor to our Scientific Advisory Board," said Dr. Tatiana Nikolskaya, President of GeneGo. "His scientific expertise and industry name recognition will be a valuable addition as we develop new products and move into additional markets". Dr. Cantor is currently Chief Scientific Officer and a Board Director of SEQUENOM, Inc. He is also director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology at Boston University. Dr. Cantor has held positions at Columbia University and University of California at Berkeley, and was director of the Human Genome Center of the Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In 2002, he founded SelectX Pharmaceuticals.
THE SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER LICENSES GENEGO'S METACORE™ PLATFORM FOR SYSTEMS BIOLOGY APPLICATIONS New Buffalo, Michigan, July 23, 2003 - GeneGo announced today that it will license its MetaCore™ platform to the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC). MetaCore™ is a proprietary computational platform for Systems Biology that combines analytical tools, data content, and algorithms for understanding the complex interconnected pathways that are affected in common human diseases. Under the agreement, the SDSC will make MetaCore™ available to SDSC and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) researchers to apply to their own research programs. GeneGo will provide training and host educational seminars, symposia, and user group meetings. Additional details about the agreement were not disclosed. "We are pleased that one of the world's most prestigious centers for computational biosciences is licensing the MetaCore™ Platform," said Dr. Tatiana Nikolskaya, CEO of GeneGo. "SDSC has consistently been at the forefront of applying leading-edge information systems to biomedical research, and their decision to license MetaCore™ is an important validation of the power and utility of the Systems Biology solution we have developed." Several SDSC faculty members already have plans to work with MetaCore™ in their research programs. One faculty member, Dr. Phil Bourne, Professor of Pharmacology, will use MetaCore™ as part of his Encyclopedia of Life project. This in silico high-throughput proteomics project is an open collaboration that aims to develop a flexible, powerful reference system to catalog, calculate three-dimensional models, and assign biological functions for the complete proteome of every living species. Another faculty member, Dr. Shankar Subramanian, Professor of Bioengineering, will use MetaCore™ as part of his efforts in the Alliance for Cellular Signaling (AfCS) collaboration. AfCS is a large-scale collaboration designed to answer global questions about cell signaling networks to facilitate quantitative modeling and eventually lead to a full understanding of how cells interpret signals in a context-dependent manner. "The interactions between GeneGo and SDSC have been quite fruitful in the last few months," said Professor Kim Baldridge, Director of Integrative Computational Sciences at the SDSC. "We look forward to providing MetaCore™ to the research community we serve, and to building a strong, collaborative relationship with GeneGo." About the San Diego Supercomputing Center The San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) is a national laboratory whose mission is to develop and apply high-performance information technologies for science and society. SDSC is a research unit of the University of California, San Diego, and the leading-edge site of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a 48-institution partnership funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)to create computational environments for tomorrow's scientific discovery. SDSC is a recognized world leader in computational biosciences, hosting the primary Protein Data Bank web and data servers, and playing the key bioinformatics and information coordination roles for the Biomedical Informatics Research Network, the Alliance for Cell Signaling, the Joint Center for Structural Genomics, the National Biomedical Computation Resource, and the Computational Center for Macromolecular Structure. Additional information is available at www.sdsc.edu.
GENEGO RECEIVES 1.4 MILLION DOLLAR AWARD FROM THE MICHIGAN LIFE SCIENCE CORRIDOR New Buffalo, Michigan, June 16, 2003 - GeneGo announced today the receipt of a 1.4 million dollar award from the Michigan Life Science Corridor (MLSC). With over 151 companies competing for 18 awards, it reinforces the life science industry's endorsement of GeneGo's technology. "We are delighted to have received this award from MLSC," said Dr. Tatiana Nikolskaya, CEO of GeneGo. "Our MetaCore™ platform, which contains the largest human content available today, has established us as a leader in computational systems biology. MetaCore™ is the first commercially available computational platform for human Systems Biology, and is designed to assist pharmaceutical researchers in the areas of target selection, prioritization, and validation, as well as biomarker identification. We will use the funds to further develop this product and to expand our sales, customer support, and application divisions." GeneGo will maintain its position as one of the leaders in the field by continuing to focus on new product development. Plans for the MetaCore™ platform include more advanced visualization tools, additions to the disease map library, and staying current with all relevant published literature. The company is also committed to increasing the field scientist team so that they can provide support to customers on how to apply MetaCore™ to their research programs. In addition to the MLSC award, GeneGo has received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a division of the NIH. This grant will be used to support the development of its next product, MetaDrug™, an in silico platform for predicting metabolism and possible toxic effects of novel drug candidates. Expected to launch in the latter part of this year, MetaDrug™ will integrate advanced QSAR and expert system approaches with GeneGo's extensive database on human pathways and their software for reconstruction and visualization of metabolic and cell signaling networks. The company's growing recognition and unique technology portfolio will pave the way for additional awards from state and federal programs. MetaCore™ is a trademark of GeneGo, Inc.
GENEGO RELEASES THE METACORE™ PLATFORM, A NEW SYSTEMS BIOLOGY SOLUTION FOR DRUG RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT APPLICATIONS New Buffalo, Michigan, March 25, 2003 - GeneGo announced today the commercial launch of MetaCore™, a proprietary computational platform for Systems Biology that combines analytical tools, data content, and algorithms for understanding the complex interconnected pathways that are affected in common human diseases. MetaCore™ is the first commercially available computational platform for human Systems Biology and has been designed to assist pharmaceutical researchers in the areas of target selection, prioritization, and validation, as well as biomarker identification. MetaCore™ integrates all levels of cellular functionality - from membrane receptors to signal transduction, transcription factors, and effector networks - using in silico models to explore and predict how different disease states, and different levels of metabolites and xenobiotics, can affect the performance of the system. A unique feature of the MetaCore™ Platform is its ability to allow the researcher to integrate and visualize data from many different biological levels and types of experiments within the same system, and in the context of the existing knowledge in the literature and the extensive systems biology databases provided with the platform. MetaCore™ allows exploration of the relationships between what is happening at the level of the genome (such as genetic variation), transcriptome, proteome (including post-translational modifications and protein interactions), and metabolome. "Pharmaceutical researchers are required to make important decisions regarding target prioritization and validation which directly affect the value of their companies' portfolio of products in development," said Dr. Tatiana Nikolskaya, CEO of GeneGo. "These decisions need to be made in the context of all of the different types the data at hand, and in the past, this has been extremely difficult," continued Nikolskaya. "The data analysis tools available until now only allowed the researcher to look at one level of biological data at a time, such as RNA expression information. Clearly there are many downstream events, and complex interactions and reactions in biological systems, that must be considered as well. The 'enterprise-wide' data storage systems have not provided the answer either," she added, "as they organize data by workflow or project, and fail to provide a framework or ontogeny for how all the data is interrelated that is consistent with the fundamental mechanisms of biology. This is where MetaCore™'s strength lies." The MetaCore™ Platform's software provides data mining capabilities, and allows data from the customer's experiments to be overlaid onto the pathways. The capability to analyze and overlay RNA expression data is provided as a standard feature, and currently supported data formats are the Affymetrix U95Av2, HG-U133A, and HG-U133B GeneChips, Agilent microarrays, and public and proprietary SAGE data. Customers can choose to add optional data parsers for proteomics, metabolomics, or other levels of biological data, which are custom-built to work with the specific type of data being generated.
|
