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02.10.2006 - Current BioData announces appointment of Ian J Tarr as CEO together with a team of senior staff to drive commercial expansion

Geneva, Switzerland – October 2nd 2006. Current BioData Ltd, a joint venture between Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) SA and the Science Navigation Group, today announced a major commercial expansion program to accompany its new product development initiatives with the appointment of Ian J Tarr as Chief Executive Officer, Dr Rebecca Lawrence as Director, Editorial Services, Dr Stephanie Kappus as Chief Technology Officer, Dr Laura Thomson as Business Development Director and James Jacketti as Senior Vice President for Sales & Marketing operations.

“With these appointments, Current BioData is now firmly on track to bring an innovative new suite of databases and journals to market in early 2007” said Vitek Tracz, Chairman of the Science Navigation Group. “The products will be the first of their kind to bring information from the frontiers of protein research to our clients in the pharmaceutical industry in a manner that makes it immediately useful to them in their daily drug research activities”, he added.

“We are extremely pleased to have secured Ian Tarr’s experience in bringing highly successful products such as the Investigational Drugs database (IDdb) to market” said Professor Amos Barioch, head of Current BioData’s Scientific Advisory Board. “Ian joins a team of expert bioinformaticians and programmers that have worked alongside the Swiss-Prot team here in Geneva – we are very excited about the potential for creating a protein-centric database that really advances the efforts of our scientific colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry in bringing effective new medicines to market”, he explained.

Tarr most recently served as Executive Vice President with Thomson Scientific, a division of the international Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC), where he was responsible for the company’s products and services for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and chemical industries. He joined Thomson in 2002 when it acquired Current Drugs Ltd, where he had been Managing Director and a founding partner with Vitek Tracz and others.

“The explosion in information on protein systems and their involvement in disease has created new challenges for drug researchers” said Ian Tarr. “There is now a clear need for products that systematically sift through and evaluate this mass of data to bring the most relevant and critical information into their hands quickly and efficiently”, he explained. “Current BioData intends to bring to market a range of products and services that meet this need – the first will be our new Targeted Proteins database (see separate announcement), which we will launch early next year”, he added.

Current BioData also today announced the appointment of Dr Rebecca Lawrence as Editorial Director at its London, UK, offices. Dr Lawrence had previously served as Publishing Manager for the highly regarded Drug Discovery Today series at Elsevier, a division of the Reed Elsevier Group. “Adding extra value to annotated protein information will be an editorially-intensive process and so Rebecca’s experience in working with expert authors and reviewers in the drug discovery field will be extremely valuable to us”, commented Ian Tarr. “Dr Lawrence will manage the scale-up of our in-house editorial resources and drive the development of a large network of external collaborators and reviewers”, he added. To manage both the logistics and operational aspects of this scale-up, she is joined by Dr Laura Thomson, whose past experience includes work for the British Standards Institute (BSI) and for the Thomson Corporation. “I knew of the excellent work Laura had done at Thomson and have been impressed by the way she recently brought new products to market at BSI” explained Tarr. “As Business Development Director, she will help us to establish quickly the necessary scale of editorial operations needed to make TPdb a first class product for our customers”, he added.

Also announced today is the appointment of Dr Stephanie Kappus, formerly of GeneBio SA and the European Bioinformatics Institute, as Current BioData’s Chief Technology Officer. Dr Kappus will manage the team of software developers and bioinformaticians developing the Targeted Proteins database at Current BioData’s Geneva offices.

Current BioData is also preparing the ground for its first product launches in early 2007 with the appointment of James Jacketti as Senior Vice President for Sales & Marketing. “Jim previously managed the highly successful US sales operation at Current Drugs and so we have every confidence that he’ll bring the same success to Current BioData as we deliver innovative new products and services to our customers in the pharmaceutical and biotechnolgy industry over the coming year”, Tarr added.

About Current BioData Ltd
By combining the unique internal expertise of the founders of Swiss-Prot and the Investigational Drugs database (IDdb) in data collection, validation and evaluation, with the external expertise of an extensive network of global opinion leaders and subject specialists, Current BioData is developing products and services designed to assess the impact of new protein research on drug R&D. Established as teams of experts in “Virtual Faculties”, leading researchers in the field comment on newly published or presented data, providing intelligence on known and emerging targetable protein systems via a daily updated service, the Targeted Proteins database (TPdb). Current BioData also fosters the publication of original research on proteins and protein systems through the CBD Research Journals, a series of open-access, peer-reviewed journals published in association with sister company, BioMedCentral, also a member of the Science Navigation Group. For more information about Current BioData, please visit www.currentbiodata.com

About the Science Navigation Group
The Science Navigation Group is a group of independent companies that collaborate closely with each other to publish and develop information and services for the professional biomedical community and for the consumer market. Science Navigation Group products run the gamut from books and journals to websites, databases, maps and audiovisuals, and cater to clients as various as physicians, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, patients, students and the general public. The Group has its head office in London (UK), with additional offices in Philadelphia, Hoboken, Geneva and Tel Aviv. For more information about Science Navigation Group, please visit www.sciencenavigation.com.

About Geneva Bioinformatics SA
Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) SA is a leading bioinformatics company providing the life science community with world-class proteomics software that bridges the gap between information gathering and knowledge generation. Established in 1997, we focus our expertise on protein identification and characterization as well as proteome imaging, offering clients and partners a high degree of specialization essential to proteomics research. Close ties to academic peers and a thorough network of distribution and strategic partners give us both unfettered access to scientific excellence and recognized market presence so that we may best serve the scientific community. For more information about GeneBio, please visit: www.genebio.com


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