Berlex Licenses DoubleTwist Clustering and Alignment Tools.

Business/Health Editors

OAKLAND, Calif.--(BW HealthWire)--Feb. 24, 2000

DoubleTwist, Inc. today announced that Berlex Laboratories, Inc. has licensed DoubleTwist's proprietary Clustering and Alignment Tools. As DoubleTwist's best-selling product, the computational tools enable companies to quickly cluster and align high volumes of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and genomic sequences into full-length gene sequences suitable for gene indexing and other applications in drug discovery.

"We are very pleased to have Berlex join the growing list of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that have made DoubleTwist's Clustering and Alignment Tools an industry standard," said John Couch, Chief Executive Officer of DoubleTwist, Inc. "The sale demonstrates our continued commitment to provide pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies with state-of-the-art bioinformatics software on a product-by-product basis, as well as through our functional web portal for on-line genetic research, DoubleTwist.com."

"A robust and sensitive clustering tool is essential for identifying differentially expressed genes. In the past, Berlex has used clustering tools from the public domain. DoubleTwist's Clustering and Alignment Tools will allow us to improve our efficiency by orders of magnitude without compromising sensitivity," said Subha Srinivasan, Head of Molecular Informatics at Berlex Biosciences.

In addition to being used by many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, DoubleTwist's Clustering and Alignment Tools have been used to process the public data (ESTs and known mRNAs), creating DoubleTwist's proprietary Gene Indices. These unique databases are accessible using specific research agents on DoubleTwist.com. The Tools' Cluster Viewer, which allows scientists to visualize all the ESTs that comprise a cluster as well as associated consensus sequences, is also available on DoubleTwist.com.

Committed to developing novel therapeutics that address unmet medical needs, Berlex Laboratories, Inc. researches, manufactures, and markets ethical pharmaceuticals in four strategic areas: Female Healthcare, Diagnostic Imaging, Dermatology, and Therapeutics for life-threatening and disabling diseases. Berlex Laboratories, Inc. has business divisions in Montville and Wayne, New Jersey and in Richmond, California.

DoubleTwist, Inc. is an application service provider (ASP) devoted to empowering life scientists. The company provides research environments that leverage information technology and the World Wide Web to simplify and accelerate gene discovery.

For more information, contact DoubleTwist, Inc. at [phone] or e-mail us at [e-mail] or visit http://www.doubletwist.com.

Note to Editors: Copyright (c) 2000, DoubleTwist, Inc. All rights reserved. DoubleTwist and DoubleTwist.com are registered trademarks of DoubleTwist, Inc. The DoubleTwist logo is a trademark of DoubleTwist, Inc. All other trademarks, brands, and names are property of their respective owners.