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Biotech / Medical : Essential Therapeutics (ETRX) formerly Microcide (MCDE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (311)	11/6/2000 9:26:10 AM
From: nigel bates	Respond to of 415

Nov. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Iconix Pharmaceuticals, a chemical genomics-based biotechnology company, today announced the appointment of two key executives to lead the development of Iconix's next generation database system, called ChemExpress(TM). Dr. Kurt Jarnagin has been appointed Vice President, Biological Sciences and Chemical Genomics, and will be responsible for ChemExpress experimental design, data generation and chemical genomic content interpretation. In addition, Dr. Jarnagin will lead Iconix's internal lead discovery initiatives and advance the Company's exploratory biology and chemistry programs. Dr. Alan Roter has been appointed Vice President, Informatics, and will be responsible for ChemExpress infrastructure and integrated database development, as well as the advancement of Iconix's portfolio of expression array data mining and chemoinformatics software programs. ``Our recent strategic alliance with Motorola BioChip Systems has allowed us to accelerate the development of ChemExpress and the growth of Iconix,'' said Keith Bostian, Iconix's President and CEO. ``We plan to launch the first commercial version of Iconix's ChemExpress database product early next year, and Kurt and Alan are providing superb leadership of this effort. Their backgrounds and success at Iconix are illustrative of the exceptional people at Iconix, and of the seamless integration we have built between biology, chemistry and informatics,'' said Dr. Bostian. Iconix's ChemExpress product is a large-scale database that connects gene expression profiles, chemical structures and biological activities within a flexible informatics system. This is the first such database of its kind, enabling scientists conducting expression array experiments to understand their results in the context of specific molecular interactions between chemicals and the proteome (the set of all expressed proteins in an organism). ChemExpress will also enable Iconix to develop a portfolio of proprietary Drug Signatures(TM). An Iconix Drug Signature represents the molecular definition of a drug or lead compound's in vivo activity, and facilitates predictions of potential toxicity and efficacy in pharmaceutical drug optimization programs. In addition, Iconix has a number of advanced internal chemical genomic product discovery programs that leverage and validate the ChemExpress database. These include a focused, lead molecule-stage oncology effort based on two families of important drug targets, small G-proteins and kinases. Prior to joining Iconix in 1998, Dr. Jarnagin served in progressively senior research management roles at Roche Bioscience, where he focused on drug discovery and molecular and cell biology. Dr. Jarnagin is a noted expert in the field of G-protein coupled receptors and enzymes involved in inflammation, arthritis, atherosclerosis and asthma. He has led exploratory biology initiatives, novel assay development projects, high-throughput screening activities, small-molecule drug discovery efforts and preclinical studies in these and other areas. Prior to joining Iconix in 1998, Dr. Roter directed the computational biology and bioinformatics effort at Sequana Therapeutics, where he was a founding employee in 1993. At Sequana, Dr. Roter led the development of industry-pioneering systems for high throughput sequencing, physical mapping, automated sequence annotation, candidate gene analysis and high-throughput genotyping. From 1988 to 1993, Dr. Roter worked at Applied Biosystems where he authored software for the 373B Automated DNA Sequencer, a foundation technology for the Human Genome Project and other genomics efforts...