Embargoed till 10 am, Nov 19, 2003

Technological Collaboration Between Nanyang Technological University, Genvea Biosciences, and HP Will Speed Up Research Development in Bioinformatics

Nov 19, 2003, Singapore - NTU has stepped up its efforts in the development in
the field of Bioinformatics by teaming up with leading industrial players.

In a bid to position itself as a centre of excellence for research in Bioinformatics, NTU
announced an agreement today between NTU’s BioInformatics Research Centre
(BIRC), Genvea Biosciences and Hewlett Packard (HP) to establish a software
platform and a development infrastructure at BIRC.

This collaboration aims to further existing efforts in life-sciences research,
which include a $12.4 million project to set up one of the world’s fastest
supercomputers in March 2002.

The proposed software platform and development infrastructure will make use of gRNA
(Genomics Research Network Architecture) for computational biology and bioinformatics
research on NTU’s existing supercomputers.

"The deployment of Genvea's gRNA platform on the BIRC HP cluster not only improves
computing productivity but also reduces the time-to-discovery and accelerates
the research-to-application process for computational biology." said
A/P Seah Hock Soon, Dean, School of Computer Engineering.

The gRNA is a programmable software infrastructure for use by BIRC researchers
and is installed on both Alpha and Itanium clusters at BIRC.This will further contribute
to the existing technology resources at BIRC.

The programmable software infrastructure is suitable for the rapid-prototyping,
development and deployment of new applications in bioinformatics and data-driven
life sciences research.

The software platform and development infrastructure aim to lower the cost of
developing new software applications in order to support new discoveries and research.

Genvea will maintain and support the software infrastructure to catalyze and contribute
to the research and development of bioinformatics applications and in silico biology
research at BIRC.

In silico biology is the use of computational algorithms to create virtual systems that
emulate molecular pathways, entire cells, or more complex living systems. The
considerable "algorithmic complexity" of biological systems requires a huge amount of
detailed information for their complete description.

To have an integrative view of biology, it is critical that the diverse and overwhelming
amounts of information are adequately stored and interpreted, using advanced
computational tools.

This software-infrastructure for computational biology and bioinformatics at BIRC serves
to provide a bedrock of resources and expertise to researchers, educators and
companies working in these areas.

The complete potential of this supercomputer installation, clearly one of the most
powerful dedicated facilities for bioinformatics in the world can be harnessed by
researchers, students under its M.Sc. program as well as industry players to expedite
their R& D work. It provides a common platform for data management and analysis.

Staff, scientists, and students at BIRC will use the software architecture to develop
new computational techniques for bioinformatics research and software tools for
post-genomic pharmaceutical industry.

Beyond the technology partnership, NTU, HP and Genvea Biosciences will work closely
to enable cross sharing of critical advances in bioinformatics through collaborative
projects. BIRC will contribute their in-house expertise in computer science, systems
programming,bioinformatics and computational biology as well as her supercomputing
resources to implement these collaborative projects.

On the other hand, biotechnology and computational biology scientists from Genvea
Biosciences shall bring in significant experience in the development of extensible
technology for the rapid development and adoption of BIRC’s data-driven research
applications.

Under the MOU, all parties will promote collaborations with research groups elsewhere
and organize workshops, seminars and lectures at BIRC.