SAN DIEGO, CA--(Marketwire - May 05, 2009) -
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Accelrys, Inc. (NASDAQ: ACCL), a leading provider of scientific business intelligence software and services, has been named the winner of Bio-IT World magazine’s fifth annual Best Practice Award in the category of Knowledge Management. Accelrys’ biological information system resulted from an industry consortium composed of Merck & Co. and Abbott Laboratories, who were also recognized at the award ceremony. The consortium was nominated for its outstanding strategic innovation in the pharmaceutical discovery process.
“This year’s Best Practices competition included a record 72 entries, providing the stiffest level of competition we’ve had since it began in 2003,” said Kevin Davies, editor-in-chief, Bio-IT World. “The entry nominated by Accelrys really impressed the judges for its success in demonstrating the value of pre-competitive knowledge sharing among big pharma clients. We hope this signals a new trend that can only benefit the industry and, by extension, the practice of medicine.”
Accelrys’ award winning product, “Biological Knowledge Management: Registration, Association & Sharing,” is the result of a three year collaboration between Accelrys and two of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Abbott and Merck joined with Accelrys to collaborate on solving a critical business problem at a fraction of the cost of working separately. Although the difficulties related to IT infrastructure for registering and relating biological materials is not well known outside of the world of bench biologists and patent attorneys, it is a particularly acute challenge for knowledge management, and a significant drag on research innovation. Biological materials are notoriously complex entities, which require high levels of sophisticated understanding to define them uniquely. Through this industry consortium, a biological registration system has been developed which meets the needs across the pharmaceutical industry. Built on Accelrys’ award winning List Management and Query Services (LMQS) system for Pipeline Pilot, realizing economies of scale and utilizing an extensible SOA architecture and knowledge model, the system solves the current and future challenges related to IP protection and knowledge sharing among biologists.
“Biological materials are enormously complex,” according to Dr. Jonathan Usuka, senior director of Life Science at Accelrys. “Cell lines evolve, proteins exhibit variability, and DNA has mutations. All these nuances are difficult to convey to non-biologists, and yet are crucial if an informatics system is going to have an impact in state-of-the-art pharmaceutical discovery. Our member organizations recognized that this challenge exists primarily in the pre-competitive space, where leading companies derive more value from pooling their expertise than they could realize by competing individually. By working together, we achieved a system that ‘thinks like a biologist,’ so that scientists in these global organizations spend their time building on each other’s discoveries rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.”
The Best Practices awards were judged by 12 experts from the scientific, IT, and business communities who reviewed a total of 72 submissions from organizations ranging from large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to academic institutions and government research agencies.
Full details of the 2009 Best Practices winners and entries will be published in the July/August issue of Bio-IT World.
About Accelrys, Inc.
Headquartered in San Diego, California, Accelrys develops scientific business intelligence software and solutions for the life sciences, energy, chemicals, aerospace, and consumer products industries. Customers include many Fortune 500 companies and other commercial entities, as well as academic and government entities. Accelrys has a vast portfolio of computer-aided design modeling and simulation offerings which assist customers in conducting scientific experiments ‘in silico’ in order to reduce the duration and cost of discovering and developing new drugs and materials. Its scientific business intelligence platform underlies the company’s computer-aided design modeling and simulation offerings. The Accelrys platform can be used with both Accelrys and competitive products, as well as with customers’ proprietary predictive science products. Its flexibility, ease-of-use and advanced chemical, text and image analysis and reporting capabilities enable customers to mine, aggregate, analyze and report scientific data from disparate sources, thereby better utilizing scientific data within their organizations. For more information about Accelrys, visit http://accelrys.com/
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. Such statements, including statements relating to the Company’s products, their features, and their impact upon our customers’ organizations, are subject to risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the risk that our products will not be successfully developed, achieve market acceptance, have the anticipated impact upon our customers’ organizations, and other risks and uncertainties described in documents Accelrys has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent report on Form 10-K and any subsequent interim filings. All forward-looking statements in this document are qualified entirely by the cautionary statements included in this document and such filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from results expressed or implied by forward-looking statements contained in this document. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this document. Accelrys disclaims any intent or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in its expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.
