STRUCTURAL BIOINFORMATICS INC. AND CYBERCHEMICS, INC. COLLABORATE TO SPEED THE GENERATION OF HEPATITIS C VIRAL PROTEASE INHIBITORS

Business Editors and Health Writers

SAN DIEGO, CA - January 27, 1997 (Business Wire) - Structural Bioinformatics Inc. ("SBI") and CyberChemics, Inc. ("CCI") announce the formation of a collaborative effort aimed at speeding the generation of novel viral protease inhibitors through a combination of advanced and proprietary computational technologies.

In initial research efforts, the two computer-oriented bioinformatics and drug design companies will apply their complementary computational technologies to attack the Hepatitis C viral protease. An effective treatment for Hepatitis C is currently not available but much interest and effort by both large and small pharmaceutical companies is currently focused on this disease. SBI will design non-peptide drug leads based on the computational structural analysis of sequences of highly active novel viral protease inhibitors generated by the application of CCI's algorithms.

Structural Bioinformatics of San Diego, CA 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. SBI's proprietary genomics-driven / protein structure-based drug design algorithms facilitate the rapid design and identification of small molecule lead compounds based on novel gene sequences and the comparative structural analysis of pharmaceutically interesting protein families. SBI is building corporate partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, gene discovery companies, and combinatorial chemistry companies covering a spectrum of activities, including drug target-specific analyses, as well as broad technology collaborations.

CyberChemics, Inc. is a new company with offices in Huntsville, Alabama and laboratories in Stonybrook, New York. CCI uses advanced artificial intelligence programming techniques to generate suites of biologically active peptides. Two proof of principle projects have generated over a hundred active compounds de novo, with an active hit rate of better than 50% for the generation of antimicrobial compounds and over 70% for the generation of HIV-I protease inhibitors. The proprietary algorithms developed by CCI create a wide diversity of potential lead compounds on the computer while the critical screening functions are also done in virtuo and so limit the actual number of compounds requiring synthesis. The successful application of CCI's platform technology to the generation of HIV-I protease active substrates has encouraged this new collaboration.