Four World-Class Scientists Join SBI's Scientific Advisory Board.

Business Editors and Health/Medical Writers

BIOWIRE2K

SAN DIEGO--(BW HealthWire)--Oct. 16, 2000

Structural Bioinformatics Inc. Monday announced that Dr. Michael Levitt, Professor and Chair of Computational Structural Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine, Professor Minoru Kanehisa of Kyoto University, Dr. Steve Bryant at National Institutes of Health, and Dr. John Reed, Head of Research at the Burnham Cancer Research Institute in La Jolla, have joined Structural Bioinformatics' Scientific Advisory Board of leading bioinformatics, protein structure, and internationally recognized pharmaceutical industry experts.

-- Dr. Michael Levitt is Chair of Computational Structural Biology at Stanford
University School of Medicine, and co-directs the Program in Mathematics and
Molecular Biology. He is a former Head of the Department of Chemical Physics at
the Weizmann Institute, Israel, and a former tenured faculty member of the MRC
Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Dr. Levitt is distinguished for his
theoretical work in computational biology, especially protein folding and
definition and enumeration of fold classes, automated secondary structure
identification, and molecular dynamics simulations. In addition, he developed a
method that was considered one of the best for ab initio folding at the 1998
CASP meeting. His present research focus is to predict structure from sequence
by both homology modeling and ab initio folding, and to combine this with
comprehensive classifications of all protein structures and sequences in a map
of protein space that helps elucidate cellular function.

-- Dr. John Reed is Scientific Director of the Burnham Institute and also
currently heads the Institute's Program on Apoptosis & Cell Death. Dr. Reed
earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine in 1986, where he also received his clinical and postdoctoral
training. In 1989, Dr. Reed was appointed Assistant Professor, Department of
Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine, and Assistant Director, Laboratory of Molecular Diagnosis at the
Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Reed was recruited to the
Burnham Institute in 1992 and was subsequently appointed Deputy Director of the
Institute's NCI Cancer Center in 1994. Dr. Reed is the author of over 450
papers and has published more articles on apoptosis and cell death in the past
six years than any other scientist worldwide. During 1996-1998, Dr. Reed ranked
first among biomedical researchers worldwide for the impact of his research.
Dr. Reed is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, and he serves on the
editorial boards of more than 10 scientific journals.

-- Professor Minoru Kanehisa is Head of the Kanehisa Laboratory in the
Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University which focuses on developing
theoretical frameworks for understanding information flow in biological systems
in terms of genes, gene products, other biomolecules, and their interactions.
The laboratory directs the informatics portion of the Human Genome Project of
the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, and the Genome Frontier
Project "Gene Network" of the Science and Technology Agency. The laboratory has
an extension called the Supercomputer Laboratory, which houses Cray/SGI
supercomputer systems, provides computational services to the Institute and to
the entire Kyoto University, and internationally provides the GenomeNet
Database Service.

-- Dr. Steve Bryant is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for
Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institute of
Health. In 1981, Dr. Bryant earned his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine, and became an Associate in the Department of Biostatistics
at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. Additional
positions in his background include Post Doctoral Research Associate at
University of London and Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Assistant
Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the State University of
New York at Albany. Dr. Bryant has won several Honors and Awards, and is the
author of numerous papers and book chapters. He has developed several databases
and protein structure analysis tools, which are widely used in the Structural
Biology and Bioinformatics community. His most notable contributions are
Entrez/3D, MMDB, PKB, PDBeast, VAST-search tool and GIBS-Threading.

Structural Bioinformatics is a world leader in computational proteomics -- the large-scale generation and use of protein structure and protein structural information. The company has developed advanced technologies to generate highly refined three-dimensional structural models of proteins from primary genetic information and commercializes these technologies through its structural database products and through drug discovery collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies. SBI has offices in San Diego and Horsholm, Denmark.