SAN DIEGO, CA - (October 16, 2000) - Structural Bioinformatics, Inc. today announced that Dr. Michael Levitt, Professor and Chair of Computational Structural Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine, Professor Minoru Kanehisa of Kyoto University, Dr. Steve Bryant at National Institutes of Health, and Dr. John Reed, Head of Research at the Burnham Cancer Research Institute in La Jolla, have joined Structural Bioinformatics' Scientific Advisory Board of leading bioinformatics, protein structure, and internationally recognized pharmaceutical industry experts.

Dr. Michael Levitt is Chair of Computational Structural Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and co-directs the Program in Mathematics and Molecular Biology. He is a former Head of the Department of Chemical Physics at the Weizmann Institute, Israel, and a former tenured faculty member of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Dr. Levitt is distinguished for his theoretical work in computational biology, especially protein folding and definition and enumeration of fold classes, automated secondary structure identification, and molecular dynamics simulations. In addition, he developed a method that was considered one of the best for ab initio folding at the 1998 CASP meeting. His present research focus is to predict structure from sequence by both homology modeling and ab initio folding, and to combine this with comprehensive classifications of all protein structures and sequences in a map of protein space that helps elucidate cellular function.

Dr. John Reed is Scientific Director of the Burnham Institute and also currently heads the Institute's Program on Apoptosis & Cell Death. Dr. Reed earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1986, where he also received his clinical and postdoctoral training. In 1989, Dr. Reed was appointed Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Assistant Director, Laboratory of Molecular Diagnosis at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Reed was recruited to the Burnham Institute in 1992 and was subsequently appointed Deputy Director of the Institute's NCI Cancer Center in 1994. Dr. Reed is the author of over 450 papers and has published more articles on apoptosis and cell death in the past six years than any other scientist worldwide. During 1996-1998, Dr. Reed ranked first among biomedical researchers worldwide for the impact of his research. Dr. Reed is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, and he serves on the editorial boards of more than ten scientific journals.

Professor Minoru Kanehisa is Head of the Kanehisa Laboratory in the Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University which focuses on developing theoretical frameworks for understanding information flow in biological systems in terms of genes, gene products, other biomolecules, and their interactions. The laboratory directs the informatics portion of the Human Genome Project of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, and the Genome Frontier Project "Gene Network" of the Science and Technology Agency. The laboratory has an extension called the Supercomputer Laboratory, which houses Cray/SGI supercomputer systems, provides computational services to the Institute and to the entire Kyoto University, and internationally provides the GenomeNet Database Service.

Dr. Steve Bryant is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. In 1981, Dr. Bryant earned his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and became an Associate in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. Additional positions in his background include Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of London and Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the State University of New York at Albany. Dr. Bryant has won several honors and awards, and is the author of numerous papers and book chapters. He has developed several databases and protein structure analysis tools, which are widely used in the Structural Biology and Bioinformatics community. His most notable contributions are Entrez/3D, MMDB, PKB, PDBeast, VAST Search tool and GIBBS Threading.

Structural Bioinformatics is a world leader in computational proteomics -- the large-scale generation and use of protein structure and protein structural information. The Company has developed advanced technologies to generate highly refined three-dimensional structural models of proteins from primary genetic information and commercializes these technologies through its structural database products and through drug discovery collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies. SBI has offices in San Diego, CA and Hørsholm, Denmark.