ITHACA, NY - October 16, 2002 - Gene Network Sciences (GNS), a pioneer in systems biology and cell simulation, has been selected by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to receive a $2 million, three-year Advanced Technology Program (ATP) award. The company will use the funds to expand its in silico cell simulations and to predict the efficacy and toxicity of drug compounds acting on particular targets.

The GNS technology holds the promise of taking the profusion of biological data being generated on potential drug targets and making it highly functional by showing how these targets fit into the complex biochemical circuitry of cells. GNS has created the largest data-driven computer model of a human cancer cell, which consists of more than 500 genes and proteins. The ATP funding will accelerate the cell simulation research and allow GNS to collect additional experimental data points of mRNA, protein, and phosphorylated protein levels from its wet lab.

"Our in silico models have the potential to shave three to four years off the drug discovery process, resulting in a cost savings of tens of millions of dollars," said Iya Khalil, co-founder and vice president of R&D for Gene Network Sciences. "A vast majority of new drug candidates fail toxicity studies. With the ATP award, we're creating an early-stage means of rapidly identifying targets which specifically kill cancer cells and weeding out targets that lead to adverse side effects in normal cells."

GNS has created proprietary tools to tame the complexity of biological modeling and to integrate large-scale biological data. The company utilizes its Diagrammatic Cell LanguageTM (DCL) to visually represent cellular interactions and its Visual CellTM drawing toolkit to compose cellular networks in the DCL. GNS also has proof of concept for its optimization and network inference algorithms, which infer unknown cell circuitry.

Last month, GNS announced that it received a $100,000 Phase One Small Business Innovation Research Grant from the National Institutes of Health.

 
About Gene Network Sciences

Founded in August 2000, Gene Network Sciences (www.gnsbiotech.com) is a privately held biotech company headquartered in Ithaca, New York. A pioneer in the field of systems biology, GNS integrates biological and chemical data to create accurate and robust computer models of cell function and human biology. GNS helps pharmaceutical companies better understand the complex human biological systems that they seek to affect. The company's technology will ultimately increase clinical trial success rates and help bring better drugs to market faster.

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