Business Editors and Health Writers

SAN DIEGO, CA -- October 27, 1997 (Business Wire) - Privately held Structural Bioinformatics Inc. ("SBI") of San Diego, California, has appointed Professor Ruben A. Abagyan, Ph.D, from New York University's Department of Biochemistry and Courant Institute of Mathematics, to their Scientific Advisory Board.

Dr. Abagyan's research centers around the structural and functional characteristics of biological sequences, protein modeling by homology, protein design, prediction of protein association, ligand-protein docking, and peptide folding by global energy optimization. This background perfectly compliments SBI's business of elucidating protein structural information for drug design and other biological purposes.

Dr. Abagyan has held academic positions in the past at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany and received grants for his work in bioinformatics and homology modeling. He earned his PhD. at Moscow State University, studying Theoretical Protein Structure Prediction and crystallography, and has published a large number of papers on the subjects of protein structure prediction and biomolecular design. His novel computational technology of loop design was proved to be highly accurate after recent crystallographic structure determination of two reengineered proteins.

Structural Bioinformatics has developed a supercomputational operating system making possible the immediate and practical use of genomic (gene sequence) data in a broad range of structure-based drug discovery and design processes leading to the rapid design and identification of small molecule lead compounds. SBI is building corporate partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, gene discovery companies, and combinatorial chemistry companies ranging from broad technology collaborations to assistance with specific drug targets or target groups.