The Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium Incorporates Ingenuity Pathways Analysis Into Its Collaborative Research Efforts To Facilitate Identification Of Novel Targets

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., March 14 /PRNewswire/ -- The Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium (PNDRC) and Ingenuity Systems today announced that they have entered into an arrangement for the licensing of Ingenuity Pathways Analysis, assisting the PNDRC's gene expression efforts on neuropsychiatric disorders. The Consortium will utilize the newest release of the Ingenuity Pathways Analysis to illustrate significant differences in gene expression and to determine their distribution in neuronal pathways, circuits and target systems. The PNDRC classifies their scientific findings according to criteria such as directionality of the changes, pathways, gene ontology terms and drugable targets. Ingenuity Pathways Analysis supports this approach by enabling creation and comprehensive analysis of customized pathways that correlate gene expression profiles to functions, diseases, pathways, and molecular mechanisms.

The PNDRC aims to discover the neurobiological and genetic causes of severe psychiatric disorders such as major depression, manic-depressive illness or bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Ultimately, the PNDRC strives to identify novel targets for the treatment of these diseases. The Ingenuity Pathways Analysis application is being applied to PNDRC's research programs specifically to extract insights from gene expression experiments, integrate high quality annotations, and have a more dynamic view of gene structure and function.

"Ingenuity's Pathways Analysis software offers the PNDRC the opportunity to explore many options for understanding the data from both our expression and genetics studies. It is unusual to see an informatics package capable of integrating so many types of information. This capacity should substantially facilitate the huge problems faced in such broad scale biology," said Dr. Stanley Watson, Site Director at the University of Michigan.

Ingenuity Pathways Analysis (IPA) is a web-delivered software application that enables researchers to model, analyze and understand the complex biological systems at the core of life science research. IPA is deployed in most major pharmaceutical companies and hundreds of biotechnology companies and academic institutions globally. It supports analysis of all high throughput analysis platforms and is used in virtually all areas of drug discovery and development from target identification and validation to biomarkers, predictive toxicology, and pharmacogenomics.

Fully functional complimentary trials of the NEW Ingenuity Pathways Analysis are available at www.ingenuity.com/trial.

About Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium (PNDRC)

The PNDRC is a collaborative research enterprise comprised of several academic institutions including scientific groups at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, University of California at Irvine, and the University of California at Davis, and recently joined by Weill Medical College of Cornell University. The PNDRC is focused on understanding the neurobiology and genetics of mood disorders and schizophrenia. It is conducting studies on human post-mortem tissue, blood samples from isolated populations, and various animal models, to identify altered profiles of gene expression in blood or brain circuits associated with these disorders. Its aim is to uncover the causes of these illnesses, identify novel targets for their diagnosis, treatment and prevention and to ensure that applications of these discoveries are utilized to the fullest extent possible. More information is available at http://www.pritzkerneuropsych.org/

About Ingenuity Systems(R)

Ingenuity enables researchers to model, analyze and understand complex biological systems foundational to human health and disease. The Ingenuity products include pathways analysis software and knowledge bases for biologists and bioinformaticians, and enterprise knowledge management infrastructure, content and services for leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Ingenuity was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Redwood City, California with offices in Germany, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan. www.ingenuity.com

Disclosure notice: Certain Pritzker family business interests have an indirect shareholding in Ingenuity Systems through Bay City Capital Fund II, L.P.

Ingenuity Systems

CONTACT: Manuel Lopez, Scientific Liaison of Pritzker NeuropsychiatricDisorders Research Consortium, +1-415-835-9349 or manuellopez@cdsp.com; orHeidi Bullock, Director, Marketing, of Ingenuity Systems, +1-650-381-5150,fax +1-650-381-5190, or hbullock@ingenuity.com

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