“IBM announced today that it has made its first equity
investment in a life sciences company. IBM is investing in
Structural Bioinformatics, Inc. (SBI), whose advanced
three-dimensional protein models make it possible for
pharmaceutical researchers to design and develop disease-fighting
drugs faster and at lower cost.”
“As SBI’s strategic information technology (IT) partner, IBM
will provide hardware and software, including a high-performance
cluster of eServer xSeries servers running Linux. The new
Linux-based system will enhance SBI’s ability to perform
high-resolution protein modeling, including dynamics
calculations that track the changing shapes of protein molecules
and shed light on the role of individual chemical structures in
human disease.”
“IBM’s DB2 Universal Database will become SBI’s strategic
development platform. IBM WebSphere will provide the Internet
software infrastructure for accessing protein structures on the
Web. Additionally, SBI will begin marketing its Variome structural
variant database modules to pharmaceutical companies in early 2001
with DB2 as the preferred database.”