Press centre

03.03.2005 - GeneBio & Current Science Group form joint venture, launch Current BioData Ltd. to promote added-value knowledge-based platform

Geneva, Switzerland, and London, UK - March 3, 2005 - Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) S.A. and the Current Science Group today announce the formation of a joint venture company called Current BioData Ltd. The newly formed company will focus on the further development, promotion and distribution of the ProXenter platform with the aim of bringing it to market in the very near future.

ProXenter, a Protein Exploration Center developed by GeneBio, is a Web-based information resource and discovery platform focused on specific groups of proteins of high interest to life sciences research in general and particularly to the pharmaceutical and drug discovery industry. For each group of proteins, ProXenter offers a unique access point that guides research scientists to rapidly integrate and analyze information about those proteins, furthering knowledge-driven research decisions.

"GeneBio has been working on the development of ProXenter for three years with the objective of bringing to research scientists a second-to-none product that allows them to overcome the information overload they face in their day-to-day work," said Nasri Nahas, CEO of GeneBio. "We truly believe that the life science industry has changed in the last few years; we are no longer in an information-limited era, but rather are overwhelmed by a massive amount of data in a knowledge-limited context. We were thus very confident that the mixture of searchable data and annotated editorial content, together with appropriate tools for navigation and data analysis, was the right approach needed to start tackling the challenge of transforming data to knowledge. The Current Science Group represents the ideal innovative partner to work with us along this line. We are very pleased to finally bring ProXenter to market and to be going into business with such a well-known and respected publisher. We found a kindred spirit in the Current Science Group that will bring to this great adventure their experience in editorial publishing as well as their strength in sales and marketing, and we look forward to a prosperous relationship."

The "heart" of ProXenter is a protein relational database that holds a comprehensive dataset for each known protein in the group under scrutiny. This includes data extracted from major databases, such as Swiss-Prot, in-depth manual annotation by external expert scientists, and pre-computed protein properties. Alongside the extensive dataset, ProXenter offers a number of tailored bioinformatics tools, as well as browsing, visualization and analysis tools that allow researchers to easily and intuitively access information and maximize usage, turning it into pertinent biological knowledge.

The dataset, to which ProXenter adds extensive knowledge from other sources together with software tools, originates from the world-famous Swiss-Prot database, the unique protein sequence database developed by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and the European Institute of Bioinformatics (EBI), now part of the UniProt consortium. Current BioData and the Swiss-Prot Group at the SIB intend to collaborate to ensure that researchers get access to the most comprehensive and reliable biological knowledge.

"UniProt, whose cornerstone is the Swiss-Prot database, represents an important international public effort to specifically gather and annotate protein sequence data. The continuously increasing amount of both protein related data and other information coming from parallel disciplines (genomics, metabolomics, etc.) undoubtedly requires that outside partners use UniProt to create around it wider satellite, added-value knowledge-bases to complete this effort that will then be of invaluable help to life science researchers. We are proud that a company like Current Science Group will use Swiss-Prot as a foundation for such an endeavour," said Prof. Amos Bairoch, Director of the Swiss-Prot Group at the SIB.

"Current BioData and our collaboration with Swiss-Prot's outstanding team reflects our belief that the future of scientific publishing will include highly specialized, editorially intensive databases that take publicly available and other data and add annotations, presentation tools and other editorial content," said Vitek Tracz, Chairman of the Current Science Group. "We look forward to creating, in collaboration with GeneBio and the SIB, innovative and useful services for the life science research community."

ProXenter will be launched with several groups of proteins, with plans to release the first ones very soon and to then frequently deliver updates and new topics.

 About Current Science Group
The Current Science 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. Our 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 and Tel Aviv. For more information about the Current Science Group, please visit: http://current-science-group.com/.

About GeneBio
Founded in 1997, GeneBio is a multifaceted bioinformatics company situated at the heart of the Lake Geneva Region, one of the world's major proteomics centres of excellence. Based on expertise in the proteomics and bioinformatics fields, GeneBio offers original educational and knowledge-discovery solutions that help clients shape heterogeneous information into relevant biological knowledge. For more information about GeneBio, please visit: www.genebio.com.

GeneBio contact:
Mr. Andrew Smith andrew.smith@genebio.com                                             
Tel. +41.22.702.99.00                                        

Current Science Group contact:
Grace Baynes grace@biomedcentral.com
Tel. +44 20 7631 9988