NETGENICS DESIGNATED DISTRIBUTOR OF KEGG DATA.

NetGenics, Cleveland, Ohio, will participate in a collaborative research effort with scientists at KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes), the world's leading biochemical pathways database. Both organizations will work together to create a powerful link between NetGenics SYNERGY software framework and the KEGG database.

Through this collaboration, NetGenics will become a designated distributor of KEGG data by providing an interface to the KEGG database through SYNERGY. This interface will facilitate the discovery of novel relationships between the biological data integrated within SYNERGY and the biochemical pathways data in KEGG.

"This collaboration will expand the ability of SYNERGY to improve life sciences research through its integrated software infrastructure," said Manuel J. Glynias, NetGenics's president and CEO. "Finding correlations between gene expression and pathways data has been like trying to find a needle in a haystack. By integrating sequence, gene expression and KEGG data together in SYNERGY, scientists will be able to find previously undiscovered, novel relationships between different proteins either within or across biochemical pathways."

Wyeth-Ayersts Genetics Institute (GI) unit, a pharmaceutical division of American Home Products Corporation (NYSE:AHP), is the NetGenics customer most likely to be the first beneficiary of the collaboration. "The addition of KEGG data to SYNERGY represents a step toward cross-domain data integration in drug discovery," says Glenn Larsen, vice president, Preclinical Research & Development, for Genetics Institute. "At AHP, scientists accessing KEGG through SYNERGY will be able to do more than just browse data; they will be able to use KEGG as an additional analytical tool for evaluating gene expression data. The CORBA architecture of SYNERGY allows for rapid integration and use of various data sources."

KEGG is an effort to computerize current knowledge of molecular and cellular biology with regard to biochemical information pathways and to provide links from the gene catalogs produced by genome sequencing projects. The KEGG project is being undertaken in the Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, as part of the Japanese Human Genome Program.

NetGenics, Inc., is a privately held company that develops and deploys information technology solutions to accelerate the drug discovery process. NetGenics' SYNERGY application framework enables a research organization to link diverse computing requirements within an enterprise-wide information infrastructure. NetGenics' services extend a pharmaceutical research department's capabilities by providing outsourced system administration, collaborative software development and end-user support functions. NetGenics was established in June 1996 and is headquartered in Cleveland, OH.

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