GeneGo, Inc. Rolls out MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis, the First Disease-Specific Software Platform to Advance Drug Discovery

ST. JOSEPH, Mich., March 26 /PRNewswire/ -- GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools company, announced today the release of MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis, a first of its kind software and database platform designed to help advance drug discovery for cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening genetic disease. This novel, disease-specific tool will provide the cystic fibrosis research community with state-of-the art methods for integrating and analyzing cystic fibrosis data.

Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Therapeutics, Inc., a non-profit affiliate of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, provided funding and guidance to the project with the goal of leveraging systems biology technology and accumulating data in order to accelerate drug discovery for this disease. Cystic fibrosis affects 30,000 people in the United States, and ten million Americans are symptomless carriers of a CF gene.

"MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis is an important new tool for the cystic fibrosis research community," said Robert J. Beall, Ph.D., president and CEO of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. "It will allow the integration of important new results with existing literature and speed up the rate of insights that can lead to new therapeutic interventions."

"We are very pleased to announce the completion of the initial phase of the project," said Julie Bryant, GeneGo's VP of Business Development. "We enjoyed working with the Foundation and the team of world-class experts they assembled for this project. In phase one, we built a database of all relevant small experiments information on the disease as well as over 30 cystic fibrosis specific pathway maps and networks. We believe this environment will help find a cure for cystic fibrosis faster as we move in to the next phase of the collaboration".

MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis includes off-the-shelf GeneGo products -- MetaCore, MetaDrug and MapEditor -- as well as cystic fibrosis experiments content annotated by GeneGo in the form of disease maps, networks and a database of biomarkers and active compounds. A committee of researchers from the cystic fibrosis community guided the cystic fibrosis-specific annotation under the sponsorship of CFFT. MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis provides researchers with the ability to interpret emerging data from global experiments, like arrays or proteomics, and link it with published literature on cystic fibrosis.

GeneGo's MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis will enable cystic fibrosis researchers to visualize complex information and prioritize research initiatives. It will also help researchers to be open to other interpretations of their experimental data and allow them to rank the significance of their results. Additionally, MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis will reduce the learning curve for researchers moving into the CF field and permit new investigators to understand outcomes more quickly.

About GeneGo

GeneGo develops systems biology technology for life science research. The original computational MetaDiscovery(TM) platform allows an integration and expert analysis of different kinds of experimental data (mRNA expression, proteomics, metabolomics, microRNA assays and other phenotypic data) and relevant bioactive chemistry (metabolites, drugs, other xenobiotics) within the framework of curated biological pathways and networks. GeneGo's flagship product, MetaCore 4.6(TM), assists pharmaceutical scientists in the areas of target selection and validation, identification of biomarkers for disease states and toxicology. The second product, MetaDrug 4.6(TM) is designed for prediction of human metabolism, toxicity and biological effects for novel small molecules compounds. MetaBase(TM) represents the knowledge base for MetaCore. For more information, please visit the company's web site at http://www.genego.com

MetaCore(TM), MetaBase(TM), MetaDrug(TM), MetaLink(TM), MetaDiscovery(TM), MetaTox(TM), MetaMiner(TM) and 1-2-3 Workflow(TM) are trademarks of GeneGo, Inc.

CONTACT: Julie Bryant, VP Business Development and Marketing of GeneGo,
Inc., +1-858-756-7996, julie@genego.com

Web site: http://www.genego.com/

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