GeneBio Releases Phenyx, Taps Vital-IT to Host Protein Identification & Analysis Platform (In Japanese)

Geneva, Switzerland - August 25, 2004 - Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) S.A. today announced the release of Phenyx, its software platform for the identification and characterization of proteins and peptides from PMF and tandem-MS mass spectrometry data. GeneBio also announced its collaboration with the powerful bioinformatics computing facility Vital-IT located at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) in order to offer its Phenyx software platform to the scientific community.

Under the terms of the agreement with the SIB, Vital-IT will host the public version of the Phenyx Calculation Engine, which users can access by downloading the Phenyx Virtual Desktop from www.phenyx-ms.com. This partnership benefits both GeneBio and Vital-IT, allowing scientists to work with Phenyx using a top-notch computing facility while at the same time enabling Vital-IT to showcase its potential for life sciences projects and software tools capabilities.

GeneBio's Phenyx is a software platform for the identification and characterization of proteins and peptides from mass spectrometry data. Developed by GeneBio in collaboration with the SIB and incorporating the true probabilistic and flexible scoring system OLAV developed at GeneProt Inc., Phenyx is specifically designed to meet the concurrent demands of high-throughput MS data analysis and dynamic high quality results assessment. End-users performing PMF or MS/MS analysis can benefit from Phenyx's many features, including tailored scoring for end-users' specific MS instrumental set-ups, inherent database access to support complex workflows and solid architecture available in multiple environments, thereby maximizing the pertinence of their protein analysis.

Phenyx is composed of two main elements, the Phenyx Virtual Desktop and the Phenyx Calculation Engine. Users who download the Phenyx Virtual Desktop from www.phenyx-ms.com. can then either submit and receive results from the freely available Calculation Engine hosted at Vital-IT, or license the Phenyx Calculation Engine for local installation to enable a more secure environment as well as more thorough and broad access. The Vital-IT center is equipped with two HP clusters of 32 production and eight development servers, based on Intel's Itanium 2 processors. This impressive array allows life scientists to harness immense computing power in order to run complicated software faster than ever before, making it an ideal venue for computationally demanding life sciences research.

"Less than four months after GeneBio unveiled its activity in the mass spectrometry data analysis field, we are extremely pleased to announce the release of Phenyx and to be able to leverage our relationship with the SIB in order to achieve this collaborative effort with Vital-IT," said Nasri Nahas, CEO of GeneBio. "We want users of Phenyx to have an excellent experience when submitting and receiving data through the Phenyx interface in order to get a feel for the potential of what Phenyx can accomplish for their research. Vital-IT is the perfect venue for the public Phenyx Calculation Engine due to its technical prowess and its mission: to provide infrastructure to support research in the field of molecular bioinformatics. We believe that the intrinsic high quality of Phenyx, in conjunction with our Vital-IT relationship, will help further the MS-based research of our future users."

Vital-IT is an innovative joint venture between academic and industrial partners designed to connect fundamental research, applied research & development and training in the field of molecular bioinformatics. This project is carried out by eight partners that each possess a high degree of competency: the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the Universities of Lausanne, Geneva and Basel, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) together with Hewlett Packard Company and Intel Corporation. These institutions have come together in an alliance of expertise that places leading edge technology, fundamental science, and the processing and analysis of biological information under one roof in the form of an innovative and robust platform.

"We are pleased to help introduce GeneBio's powerful proteomics tool to life scientists via our facility and are confident in our ability to cope with the intense computation required for the Phenyx platform," said Victor Jongeneel, Director of Vital-IT. "This center was designed to accomplish tasks like this, as it is dedicated to bioinformatics projects. A successful execution with GeneBio's Phenyx will bolster our reputation and serve notice that we have both the infrastructure and know-how to handle large-scale proteomics-based endeavours. We anticipate this collaboration will be a positive experience for all parties involved."

In addition to being available from GeneBio's Phenyx-ms server, the Vital-IT-based Phenyx platform will also be accessible from the SIB's ExPASy proteomics Web server at www.expasy.org. For more information about Phenyx, including various testing options, please visit www.phenyx-ms.com.

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