Enterprise Linux Today: IBM Invests in Structural Bioinformatics

Nov 29, 2000, 19:13 (0 Talkback[s])

"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."

Press Release