Cognia Corporation Expands Operations in Scotland

EDINBURGH, Scotland, March 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Cognia, a database specialist for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, today announced its plans to create a new operations center in Edinburgh. The new center will be responsible for commercializing and deploying "text mining" systems that help PhD-level "curators" to analyze large quantities of scientific text to identify and extract valuable information.

Cognia's information solutions help businesses and research centers cost- effectively accelerate the drug research and discovery process by providing a navigable database of the known facts about a key area of interest. These databases have the ability to collate information from more than 10 million scientific papers. The company's 30-person development center has been operating in Edinburgh since March 2005.

"Cognia is extremely excited that we can place our entire development and operations centers in a single facility in Scotland," said Cognia's CEO Robert Merold. "Scotland has a world class work force and is a leader in both life science and natural language processing. The high caliber of technologists and scientists working in Scotland also allows Cognia to deliver our truly unique products to the market with the flexibility that the industry demands."

Cognia also recently signed a commercial license agreement with Intermediary Technology Institute (ITI) Life Sciences in Scotland to develop in-license text mining intellectual property (IP) in a program with Edinburgh University's School of Informatics. ITI Life Sciences is a publicly funded, commercially driven organization that funds and manages early stage technology research and development programs in the life sciences arena.

"More effective and efficient drug discovery and development is based on speeding up the often complex research processes, including sorting through volumes of previous studies and results. Scotland's world renowned expertise in text mining and informatics will contribute significantly to the development of commercialized technologies in this field," said Lorna Jack, President of the Americas for Scottish Development International. "The country's role as an innovator in the life sciences industry, along with its highly skilled work force, is a major attraction for leading companies, such as Cognia. Cognia's partnership with the University of Edinburgh and ITI Life Sciences has also enabled Scotland to further expand its life sciences capabilities, and we anticipate that this technology will soon be transferred to other sectors."

Cognia's investment in Scotland has been supported by a Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) Grant of more than $1.5 million from the Scottish Executive and is expected to result in approximately 75 new high value jobs.

About Scottish Development International

Scottish Development International works to attract inward investment and knowledge to Scotland in order to help the economy grow. SDI also works to help Scottish companies do more business overseas and to promote Scotland as a good place to live, work and do business. It is jointly operated by the Scottish Executive and Scottish Enterprise. Its work is guided by the global connections theme of the Scottish Executive's Smart Successful Scotland strategy for economic development in Scotland. http://www.sdi.co.uk

About Cognia

Cognia is a next generation scientific database and aggregation company; a strategic information partner to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and scientific research communities. It deploys two proprietary technologies that work synergistically, creating numerous high quality, expertly human PH.D, curated life sciences discovery databases. During 2007 Cognia will be expanding capabilities to create new databases at a rate never previously possible. Cognia's offering are most valuable for drug target identification and validation; however they also add value across all areas of pre-clinical biology, system biology and computational biology. For more information, please visit http://www.cognia.com or contact Nadine Santiago at 212-331-7849 or 117 E 55th St, New York, NY 10022.

Scottish Development International

CONTACT: Emily Zyborowicz of The MWW Group, +1-212-827-3749, orezyborowicz@mww.com, for Scottish Development International

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