SAN DIEGO, CA - (January 17, 2000) - Privately-held Structural Bioinformatics, Inc. (SBI) announced today that the company has purchased the GeneMine^TM technology from Molecular Applications Group (MAG), Palo Alto, CA. Through its SBdBase^TM and SVdBase^TM protein structural database products, accessed through SBI's proprietary GeneWeb^TM interface, SBI offers a unified platform of high-quality protein structures along with bioinformatics data retrieval, integration and visualization of protein sequence information in the context of protein structural information. The acquisition of GeneMine^TM permits further enhancements to GeneWeb^TM and the unified system can collect and display an extensive array of information including homology clusters, homology fingerprints, active sites, functional motifs, post-translational modifications, metabolic pathway associations and sequence polymorphic regions, and also includes a set of efficient, highly reliable protein modeling methodologies that were developed by MAG. The software will ultimately be integrated with SBI's protein database interface, GeneWeb^TM.

"GeneMine is extremely complementary to our protein structure database, SBdBase," said Dean Goddette, Ph.D., Vice President of Sales and Marketing at SBI. "The acquisition allows us to expand the content of our own database products while providing our customers with an expanded set of tools for analysis of protein sequence and structure."

"We believe SBI is a clear leader in the area of structure modeling and are very pleased with the sale of GeneMine to SBI," said Debbie Yu, M.D., MAG's acting President and CEO.

Structural Bioinformatics is a world leader in computational proteomics--the large-scale generation and use of protein structure and protein structural properties. The Company has developed advanced and proprietary computational technologies to generate highly refined three-dimensional structural models of proteins from primary gene sequence data that compare well with crystal structures, and to perform primary drug-discovery screening in silico on millions of compounds present in SBI's scaffold-specific virtual combinatorial libraries (CombiLib^TM modules) or our clients' in-house compound collections. SBI offers two subscription database products. The first, SBdBase^TM, which is composed of thousands of structural models of proteins from more than 150 distinct families, promises to accelerate lead discovery and optimization and to enable rational experimental design broadly across multiple disciplines within the pharmaceutical and life sciences. The second, SVdBase^TM, is actually a growing series of database modules each containing structural models generated from genetic variations in a single, medically important gene, such as HIV reverse transcriptase or protease, which provide pharmacogenomic insights early-on in the drug discovery and optimization process, and facilitate the selection of optimal clinical candidates prior to initiation of clinical trials. SBI's partner in generating HIV SVdBases is Quest Diagnostics, Inc. SBI also employs its technologies in collaborative R&D programs. Current partners include BioChem Pharma Inc., Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. and DuPont Pharmaceuticals Company.