IBM Supercomputing Power to Accelerate Drug Discovery

ARMONK, NY -- December 2, 2003 -- IBM today announced Locus Pharmaceuticals has selected IBM’s Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center to supply supercomputing power for research and drug design targeted at viral infectious diseases such as HIV and AIDS. Locus Pharmaceuticals develops novel small molecule therapeutics to address major unmet medical needs.

Locus' research in drug discovery is based on proprietary algorithms for the de novo design of drug molecules. These algorithms provide the power to successfully tackle therapeutic targets that lie beyond the reach of conventional methods. When tightly integrated with chemistry and biology, the technology can shorten the cycle time for generating innovative medicines in some cases by years. To improve research efficiencies, Locus will leverage IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand compute power to increase capacity of its existing 2.3 teraflop supercomputing infrastructure. Locus scientists will tap into power from IBM’s supercomputing infrastructure of IBM eServer Cluster 1350 utilizing xSeries Intel Xeon 32-bit processors and running the Linux operating system.

"IBM computer scientists have worked with us to optimize our algorithms for their environment, delivering a dramatic increase in computing speed," said Jeff Wiseman, Vice President of Technology and Informatics, Locus Pharmaceuticals. "This impressive reduction in computational runtimes will allow us, for the first time, to obtain results in real time. By coupling increased speed with increased access to computing power, we will expand our project capacity by a factor of four, allowing us to consider even more critical disease targets. The flexibility, reliability and availability of IBM's on demand computing power will allow us to concentrate on the design of drug molecules, and in turn expand our drug discovery partner and client base."

“Customers like Locus Pharmaceuticals are critical to medical research, and having the ability to tap into IBM's supercomputing power will allow them to concentrate on their core business strengths," said David Turek, vice president, IBM Deep Computing. "Our Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center gives companies, large and small, access to the kind of supercomputing power necessary to perform complex calculations on massive amounts of data, while reducing infrastructure and operating costs."

IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center is located in IBM's Poughkeepsie, NY facility. Designed for scalability to meet variable peak demand workloads, the Deep Computing Capacity on Demand operating environment consists of a virtualized cluster of IBM eServer models with related disk storage, network infrastructure, software and services. IBM xSeries and BladeCenterTM Intel 32-bit and eServer AMD OpteronTM processor 32-bit/64-bit technologies running Linux or Windows are offered with planned availability of IBM pSeriesR POWERTM 64-bit technology running AIX 5L and Linux

About Locus Pharmaceuticals Locus Pharmaceuticals is a privately held pharmaceutical company focused on developing novel, small molecule therapeutics to address major unmet medical needs. Locus combines powerful and proprietary, fragment-based, computational technology with one of the world’s fastest Linux-based supercomputer clusters to simultaneously identify relevant binding sites on protein disease targets and rapidly generate novel, drug-like, small molecules that bind specifically to those protein sites. In contrast to other computational approaches, the Locus technology requires only a high-resolution, 3-dimensional structure of the target protein to implement its drug discovery process. Presently, Locus Pharmaceuticals is synthesizing and testing novel, computationally predicted, drug candidates for the treatment of debilitating and life-threatening human diseases including HIV/AIDS, cancer and inflammation.

About IBM IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com.

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