Cognia Announces SBIR Phase II Award for Curation and Protein Informatics Database System; Award Will Fund Continued System Design, Enhancement, and Population.

Business Editors & Health/Medical Writers

BIOWIRE2K

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

Cognia Corporation announced today the award of a $1 million, two-year small business innovation and research Phase II grant (SBIR) from the National Institutes for General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to further develop its comprehensive protein database system.

The award will fund the final phase of development of a broadly designed curation and relational database system with proprietary graphic user interfaces that provide researchers with unique network and pathway builder tools as well as advanced search algorithms.

The Phase II award allows Cognia to accelerate population of the database with expert curated information on the highly regulated ubiquitin-proteasome pathways, which are of fundamental importance for regulating intracellular protein levels. This content has direct relevance to Cognia's existing pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers as perturbations in the levels of intracellular proteins lead to many types of disease, including various cancers, neurological disorders, and inflammatory diseases. Protein catabolism is becoming a major focus for drug targeting and lead identification, in addition to being of prime importance in the exploration of pharmaceutical side effects.

"The Phase II SBIR award allows Cognia to accelerate completion of our core system while adding significant IT efficiencies to the curation process," said David M. Rubin, Ph.D, Cognia's President and Chief Executive Officer. "The award supports the difficult effort of organizing the enormous amount of data and literature on protein catabolism, an area of biology that has implications for all types of disease," said Vincent Marchesi, M.D., Ph.D., a Cognia founder and Chairman of Scientific Advisory Board.

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.