San Diego, CA  November 5, 1997 - Structural Bioinformatics Inc. (SBI) announced that it has installed an IBM RS/6000 SP to run powerful computer simulation programs that help speed the development of new and more effective drugs.  The IBM RS/6000 SP is the "supercomputer" that gained national attention during its successful challenge of world chess champion Garry Kasparov earlier this year.

    "SBI requires enormous computing power to perform the simulations that accelerate drug development," said Edward T. Maggio, President and CEO of SBI. "We needed a system that can analyze, store and display information quickly and accurately."

    "The ability of the RS/6000 SP to rapidly process large amounts of data makes it ideally suited for the drug development efforts of SBI," said Mike Borman, general manager, IBM RS/6000 Division. "More than 2,800 RS/6000 SP computers are in use around the world in such diversified industries as oil exploration, nuclear research, health care and retail analysis."

    SBI works in conjunction with leading pharmaceutical companies to discover new  disease-fighting drugs through advanced computer simulation, including work with cancer, heart disease and hepatitis. SBI will use the RS/6000 SP to calculate the minute surface characteristics of human proteins.  This information is then used to design biologically useful molecules to affect those proteins -- a key starting point for effective drug development projects.In recent years, medical science has made great headway in sequencing human DNA code. But DNA itself isn't directly involved in disease treatment.  Rather, DNA codes cause the body to create specific proteins, and it is those proteins that are the direct target for effective drug treatments.  By taking the amino acid sequences derived from genetic code, calculating protein shapes, surface characteristics, and the likely 'mobility' of the protein, SBI helps drug developers understand how to synthesize compounds that will block or activate the proteins.

 Structural Bioinformatics Inc., a private company based in San Diego, CA, has developed an accelerated structure-based lead discovery pathway to generate small-molecule lead compounds for important disease genes and other pharmaceutically interesting targets.  The pathway relies on SBI's extensive protein structural information database that is tightly integrated with a proprietary  set of computational tools.  The resulting operating system permits the identification and dynamic structural analysis of relevant sites on protein drug targets, and the direct use of this information in a variety of structure-based drug design and virtual screening applications.

     The IBM RS/6000 SP used by SBI is capable of processing 16 proteins at a time. The IBM RS/6000 SP gives SBI a 10 fold increase over their earlier modeling speeds.  This speed will be necessary as the human genome project discovers the code of over 100,000 genes over the next few years, each able to create a different protein structure.