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NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE, England, May 16 /PRNewswire/ -- The Biosystems Informatics Institute (Bii) announced today the formation of a commercial trading arm, Turbinia Limited. Turbinia will facilitate business development and marketing of software tools and fee-for-service offerings in bioinformatics and systems biology, specialising in data integration from across the post-genomic technologies. Product development of Bii will focus on monitoring, interpreting and predicting off-target drug effects.

Concurrent with the founding of Turbinia, Bii has entered its first commercial deal by securing exclusive rights to distribute mathematical know-how, systems biology support and software emanating from Moscow State University and a number of other high-profile Russian Institutes. This collaboration forms an integral part of the systems biology products and services to be offered by Turbinia. The Turbinia team now has access to an unsurpassed ability to dynamically and accurately model biochemical pathways and interpret drug effects by including both positive and negative feedback loops; inductive and deductive methods; and prediction of multiple independent outcomes in parallel. Turbinia aims to deliver targeted results in a timely and cost-effective manner, including software and interfaces to suit the needs of its customers in drug development. Unlike many other groups working in systems biology, this Russian team possesses a unique calling-card in that for more than four years and in an ongoing manner they have been adding value to drug development and the production of drug precursors to a Top Five pharmaceutical partner.

"As the pharmaceutical industry is learning in the post-genomic era, drug effects monitored by transcriptomics and proteomics give non-concordant and inconclusive results. Making sense of these multiple outcomes with respect to target and target pathways is both non-trivial and non-intuitive, even for the best informed biochemists and genomics scientists. Thus, we must depend increasingly upon advanced mathematical approaches to better integrate these findings into drug development." noted Ian Humphrey-Smith, who recently accepted the position of Chief Executive of the Bii.

"There is an enormous need within the pharmaceutical industry to introduce a more rational approach to decision making based on integration of the mountains of biochemical, genetic and production data that has been generated over many decades. This can only be achieved by applying systems biology to develop new generation software tools that are based on kinetic models of biological systems and are able to effectively analyze data from multiple sources and reliably predict dynamic and regulatory behaviour of biological systems," noted Dr Oleg Demin, who is Chief Executive of the Institute for Systems Biology, Saint Petersburg and a leading Russian developer of systems biology software. "Having successfully developed these tools for the pharmaceutical industry, we look forward to applying this knowledge to the products offered by Turbinia and Bii."

David Allison, Director of Business and Industry, One North East, said: "As an agency, we have worked hard to establish North East England as a leading location in the fields of bioscience and healthcare. By doing that, we're creating an exciting environment for attracting top-level academic talent to our region. The work going on at Bii to create commercially viable bioinformatic technologies is of vital importance to our economy, and the creation of its new commercial trading arm, Turbinia Limited, will help build its reputation around the world."

Notes to Editors The Need for Systems Biology

Advances in the biomedical sciences have created masses of information from many different sources, including the therapeutic and "off-target" effects of drugs on the body. To accelerate future advances in medicine and healthcare delivery, the pharmaceutical industry needs to place these drug-induced changes in context by introducing enhanced mathematics into the decision making process during all-stages of drug development.

About the Bii

The Biosystems Informatics Institute (Bii) is a new UK research establishment, which along with its commercial trading arm, Turbinia Limited, is focused on the delivery of systems biology and bioinformatics software tools to enable the development of better drugs and healthcare delivery. The Bii boasts links with several regional partners including One NorthEast; the Universities of Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside; and Nonlinear Dynamics, a world leader in the provision of proteomics software. For additional information, please visit http://www.biiuk.com/. This initiative is funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry and One NorthEast.

Biosystems Informatics Institute