Cognia Accelerates its Curation and Protein Informatics Program With Key Appointments.

Business Editors & Health/Medical Writers

BIOWIRE2K

NEW YORK--(BW HealthWire)--June 11, 2002

Cognia Corporation announced key board and management appointments that add significant depth and experience to the company's growing proteomics focused information technology organization.

Robert N. Merold has been appointed to the Board of Directors, Brian I. Osborne, Ph.D., has been appointed Director of Informatics, and Grace A. Stafford, Ph.D., has been appointed Curation Manager. These appointments advance Cognia's strategy to establish curation and protein informatics capabilities in support of drug discovery and basic research.

"The addition of Bob, Brian and Grace to Cognia brings knowledgeable and seasoned drug development and IT experts with deep and diverse real-world experience," said David M. Rubin, Ph.D., Cognia's President and Chief Executive Officer. "I am extremely impressed by Cognia's approach", said Mr. Merold. "Cognia's cutting-edge knowledge based informatics platform has great relevance for a wide range of disease areas."

Robert Merold is currently an Executive-in-Residence at Boston Millennia Partners, where he evaluates opportunities in the life science field. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Leadscope, a leading-edge company providing software and information in the chemo-genomic sector. Previously Mr. Merold was the Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of Proteome, Inc., which was acquired by Incyte Genomics. Prior to Proteome, Mr. Merold held a variety of executive positions at IMS Health. Before IMS, Mr. Merold was the Director of Marketing, Healthcare at Bristol-Myers Squibb Consumer Healthcare Products and served various roles in product management at The Proctor & Gamble Company. Mr. Merold is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

Before joining Cognia, Dr. Osborne led the information technology and bioinformatics effort at Cadus Pharmaceuticals and OSI Pharmaceuticals. These groups engaged in relational database design, Web application development, and oncology-focused gene discovery using Perl. Prior to that he worked on genome annotation and bioinformatics as part of the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative. Dr. Osborne received his Ph.D. from MIT in Biology for studies of aspects of Saccharomyces transcription and did his post-doctoral work at UC Berkeley in plant genetics and genomics. Brian implemented the genome annotation project at the Plant Genome Sequencing Center at UC Berkeley and is a contributor to the open-source Bioperl project.

Dr. Stafford brings an extensive background in bench science combined with superb editorial skills and annotation experience that will benefit Cognia's database development and curation. Dr. Stafford was previously with Incyte Genomics' Proteome division. There she was an editor for their BioKnowledge Library(R) working with expert curators to annotate mammalian proteome databases. Formerly, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Center, studying the role of chromatin in transcriptional regulation. Dr. Stafford earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she was the recipient of both a Cornell Biotechnology fellowship and a Pharmaceutical Manufacturers fellowship.

About Cognia

Cognia Corporation is a developer and distributor of knowledge systems that facilitate the use of biological data and information. Cognia provides an integrated curation and database platform with cutting edge visualization and analysis tools. Cognia's database products and custom curation services help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to efficiently and cost-effectively discover and develop new drugs, by accelerating research processes. Cognia's knowledge based database system supports drug discovery efforts in a wide range of disease areas and cell processes such as protein catabolism and localization. Cognia is also the exclusive North American distributor of the TRANSFAC Professional(R) and TRANSPATH Professional(R), transcription and signal transduction databases created and curated by BIOBASE GmbH of Wolfenbuttel, Germany. Cognia's customers include leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, such as Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Aventis, Schering-Plough, Celera, and laboratories with academic institutes such as Harvard Medical School, Yale University, and The Whitehead Institute.