Protein Lounge and OmniViz Announce Collaboration.

San Diego, CA and Maynard, MA, September 3, 2004 - Protein Lounge, a provider of biological pathways and other systems biology databases, and OmniViz, Inc., a leading provider of advanced visual informatics software, components, and services, announce their collaborative effort to make Protein Lounge content deployable within the OmniViz Pathway Enterprise™ (OPE) software. OmniViz will become the exclusive distributor for Protein Lounge’s pathway content within informatics software.

OPE is a full-featured pathway display, drawing, and analysis package that supports enterprise-wide sharing and searching. The underlying biological object model allows semantic integration of data, which is required when dealing with multiple users and multiple sources of information, and inherently creates a complete cross-reference of all components. OPE provides support for textbook-style drawings, including entities such as cellular components and membranes, but with interactive objects that can be color-coded according to experimental data and linked to literature analysis.

“OPE is designed to support data from all of the sources needed by our customers. The Protein Lounge pathways are rich in content and have an exceptional three-dimensional presentation that also conveys context,” said Dr. Jeffrey Saffer, President of OmniViz. Being able to offer these pathways as part of a bundled solution adds to the growing value of the OPE platform.”

Protein Lounge has over 300 manually curated cell signaling and biosynthetic pathways. Each pathway includes a detailed description and references. The content is further supported by detailed information about each protein or molecule.

“Having OmniViz as the distributor for our pathway content will expand availability of our pathways to the commercial arena,” said Dr. Samik Singh, CEO of Protein Lounge. “OPE’s enterprise-level solution provides a versatile framework for our content and will allow companies to utilize those pathways within the larger context needed for discovery.”

About Protein Lounge
Protein Lounge (www.proteinlounge.com) Protein Lounge is a leader in the field of system biology. We have developed many interactive web-based databases and software to help the life-scientists understand the complexity of systems biology. Systems biology efforts focus on understanding cellular networks, protein interactions involved in cell signaling, mechanisms of cell survival and apoptosis leading to development or identification of drug candidates against a variety of diseases. In the post-genomic era, one of the major concerns for life-science researchers is the organization of gene/protein data. Protein Lounge has met this concern by organizing all necessary data about genes/proteins into one portal. Protein Lounge has revolutionized bioinformatics by constructing the first complete siRNA target database, a complete Peptide-Antigen target database and a Kinase-Phosphatase database. We have also developed the largest database of illustrated signal transduction pathways, which are interconnected to our extensive protein database and online gene/protein analysis tools. Protein Lounge is an ideal site for both life-science researchers as well as students.

About OmniViz, Inc.
OmniViz (www.omniviz.com) provides analysis and visualization solutions and components to efficiently evaluate all available data, whether pathways, text (e.g., literature, e-mail, patents), numeric, categorical, genome sequence, or chemical structure, in one integrated framework, and irrespective of volume (e.g., millions of documents). Interactive visualizations provide a global perspective on these large disparate data sets while complementary analysis tools allow ready access to the details. Founded in 2000 as a subsidiary of Battelle, OmniViz is based in Maynard, Massachusetts.

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