Baylor College of Medicine and GeneEd Collaborate on The Development of a Novel E-Learning Training Program for the Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas -- NURSA.

Business Editors/Health/Medical Writers

BIOWIRE2K

SAN FRANCISCO & HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2003

NURSA Tutorial Provides a Succinct

Overview of Nuclear Receptor

Signaling for Researchers and Clinicians

GeneEd, Inc., the leading provider of advanced e-learning solutions for the life science industry, today announced that it has collaborated with Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) researchers to develop a novel e-learning training program for NURSA, the Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas web portal (http://www.nursa.org). The NURSA web portal is being developed with the goal of providing a single resource for the curation, management and dissemination of validated experimental data in the field of nuclear receptor research.

NURSA, a trans-NIH-funded team science project, consists of a consortium of scientists from five institutions as well as representatives from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), the National Institute of Aging (NIA), and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). GeneEd and the BCM researchers collaborated to develop the content for the training program, and then utilized GeneEd's proprietary Repurposing(TM) and Viewing(TM) engine technology to create compelling, intuitive and effective e-learning that synthesizes and summarizes both historical and recent developments in the field.

"The list of cloned and characterized nuclear receptors and coregulators is substantial, representing an explosive accumulation of information that is yet to be organized into a coherent picture of the biological significance of these molecules," said Dr. Neil McKenna of BCM, editor of the NURSA web portal. "The NURSA e-Learning program enables researchers and clinicians to understand current models of nuclear receptor signaling gathered together in a single, validated location, and made available in a succinct, easy-to-understand format."

"By utilizing our off-the-shelf learning objects in genomics, proteomics, signaling and drug design, we were able to rapidly and effectively create compelling e-learning lessons that fulfilled the mission of the NURSA portal to provide a free-standing, interactive multimedia tutorial to all visitors," said Dr. Salil D. Patel, GeneEd's co-founder and chief scientific officer. "Our validated, multimedia learning object database enables us to combine text, tables, charts, static and animated graphics and PubMed links into a single coherent whole." Added Rosanna Der, senior FLASH developer, "Repurposing GeneEd learning objects with Baylor's editorial content was fast and effective, allowing for rapid dissemination of the product, thanks to the 'knowledge object' strategy pursued by both sides. The resultant course format provides for both quizzes and interactivity."

All GeneEd catalog and custom courseware are Continuing Medical Education (CME) Category One accredited and approved. GeneEd's courses have been developed to allow simple technical integration onto a Learning Management System (LMS), and all GeneEd e-learning courses are SCORM 1.2 compliant, and have been successfully integrated with FDA-certified 21CFR11-compliant LMS applications.

About GeneEd

GeneEd, Inc. was founded in 1997 to provide life science and healthcare e-learning solutions for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, instrument and medical device, and hospital/HMO industries. GeneEd's Life Science industry customers include AstraZeneca, Pfizer, the ALZA division of Johnson & Johnson, Celera, Bio-Rad, and IBM Life Sciences, amongst many others. (http://www.geneed.com/clients/index.html)

GeneEd utilizes the best life science content, combined with advanced e-learning development technology, to rapidly create basic and advanced curricula in the areas of genomics, therapeutic area training (for clinical research, product development, and sales and marketing teams), computer assisted drug design, drug discovery and development, pharmacogenomics and clinical genomics, bioinformatics and microarray informatics, and therapeutic and diagnostic products. GeneEd, Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. Visit http://www.GeneEd.com for additional information about GeneEd and its courseware.

About NURSA

The Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas (NURSA) comprises an integrated, multidisciplinary effort to unravel the molecular, biochemical, and physiological functions of orphan nuclear receptors (ONRs), and ultimately of all nuclear receptors. Its long-term goal is to delineate the role(s) of ONRs in normal and pathophysiological conditions, including obesity, osteoporosis, hormone dependent cancers, processes of aging, and diabetes and its complications. The objective of NURSA is to provide useful data to the community in a timely fashion for use in their own investigations relevant to ONRs. Visit NURSA at http://www.nursa.org.

The primary directive of the NURSA program is to gather and organize information relating to key aspects of orphan nuclear receptor biology, with the aim of extending this blueprint to the wider discipline of nuclear receptor signaling. Commensurate with this directive, NURSA's goals can be distilled into two broad aims: (i) to execute research strategies designed to rapidly and efficiently elucidate those facets of orphan nuclear receptor biology deemed most critical to its understanding; and (ii) to facilitate the generation of hypotheses, design of experiments and communication of results by scientists active in the field.