For Immediate Release:

GENEGO RELEASES THE METACORE™ PLATFORM, A NEW SYSTEMS BIOLOGY SOLUTION FOR DRUG RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT APPLICATIONS

New Buffalo, Michigan, March 25, 2003 — GeneGo announced today the commercial launch of MetaCore™, a proprietary computational platform for Systems Biology that combines analytical tools, data content, and algorithms for understanding the complex interconnected pathways that are affected in common human diseases.

MetaCore™ is the first commercially available computational platform for human Systems Biology and has been designed to assist pharmaceutical researchers in the areas of target selection, prioritization, and validation, as well as biomarker identification. MetaCore™ integrates all levels of cellular functionality - from membrane receptors to signal transduction, transcription factors, and effector networks – using in silico models to explore and predict how different disease states, and different levels of metabolites and xenobiotics, can affect the performance of the system.

A unique feature of the MetaCore™ Platform is its ability to allow the researcher to integrate and visualize data from many different biological levels and types of experiments within the same system, and in the context of the existing knowledge in the literature and the extensive systems biology databases provided with the platform. MetaCore™ allows exploration of the relationships between what is happening at the level of the genome (such as genetic variation), transcriptome, proteome (including post-translational modifications and protein interactions), and metabolome.

“Pharmaceutical researchers are required to make important decisions regarding target prioritization and validation which directly affect the value of their companies’ portfolio of products in development,” said Dr. Tatiana Nikolskaya, CEO of GeneGo. “These decisions need to be made in the context of all of the different types the data at hand, and in the past, this has been extremely difficult,” continued Nikolskaya. “The data analysis tools available until now only allowed the researcher to look at one level of biological data at a time, such as RNA expression information. Clearly there are many downstream events, and complex interactions and reactions in biological systems, that must be considered as well. The ‘enterprise-wide’ data storage systems have not provided the answer either,” she added, “as they organize data by workflow or project, and fail to provide a framework or ontogeny for how all the data is interrelated that is consistent with the fundamental mechanisms of biology. This is where MetaCore™’s strength lies.”

The MetaCore™ Platform’s software provides data mining capabilities, and allows data from the customer’s experiments to be overlaid onto the pathways. The capability to analyze and overlay RNA expression data is provided as a standard feature, and currently supported data formats are the Affymetrix U95Av2, HG-U133A, and HG-U133B GeneChips,? Agilent microarrays, and public and proprietary SAGE data. Customers can choose to add optional data parsers for proteomics, metabolomics, or other levels of biological data, which are custom-built to work with the specific type of data being generated.

About GeneGo: GeneGo is a privately held company that develops technology and computational platforms for the pharmaceutical and life science industries in the rapidly growing field of Systems Biology. GeneGo offers the first commercially available computational platforms that integrate information about human genes, RNA, proteins, metabolites, and biological pathways to provide a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms of disease, and a broader yet more efficient approach to drug target selection, prioritization, and validation, as well as biomarker identification. The company’s MetaCore™ and MetaDrug™ Platforms combine proprietary and public knowledge with the customer’s own data to enable the researcher to model and predict the behavior of biological systems. GeneGo was founded in 2000 and is based in New Buffalo, Michigan. Additional information about GeneGo is available at www.genego.com.

MetaCore is a trademark of GeneGo, Inc.

Affymetrix and GeneChip are registered trademarks of Affymetrix, Inc.

Agilent is a registered trademark of Agilent Technologies.