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May 7, 2002

AnVil Receives Two Grants from National Institutes of Health to Help Discover Potential Cancer Drugs

Life sciences discovery pioneer to create software tools to speed analysis of cancer data, and to identify beneficial drugs

Burlington, MA - May 7, 2002 - AnVil, a pioneering life sciences discovery company that turns data into decision-quality knowledge, today announced that it has been awarded two Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop software tools used in the discovery of cancer drugs.

The tools and methods that AnVil is developing will advance cancer research by enabling pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies to better identify the effects of potential drug candidates on cancerous cells. These companies can then make more informed decisions about future drugs and treatments.

Under the first grant, AnVil will develop techniques for integrating quantitative cluster comparison metrics with new high-dimensional visualization technologies to provide cancer researchers with unique decision-making tools they can apply to their data. AnVil will apply these new tools to the analysis of the National Cancer Institute DIS compound data set, composed of data on chemical compounds applied to 60 cancer cell lines and combined with an external source of gene expression data for the same 60 cell lines.

The second grant will enable AnVil to develop a powerful new high-dimensional visualization technology to analyze cancer data, as well as new methods of data mining. AnVil will apply this technology to the National Cancer Institute DIS compound data set; performing innovative and efficient data mining on a combination of computed chemical descriptors and cell line GI50 chemical test data to discover new structure activity patterns that may be clinically useful for treating cancer.

The NIH awards SBIR grants to small businesses engaged in biomedical or behavioral research areas that fall within their mission to improve human health. The purpose of this grant program is to harness the innovative talents of small companies to conduct innovative research and development that has potential for commercialization and public benefit.

"AnVil's technology is a perfect fit for the goals of this grant program," said Michael J. McManus, Ph.D., AnVil's Executive VP and Chief Operating Officer. Dr. McManus is also the Principal Investigator for these grants. He added, "We develop and use robust analytic and visualization applications that help life sciences companies find commercially valuable information in their data. We work behind the scenes to contribute to advances in public health everyday and we're pleased to contribute to the goals of the NIH."

"There are many different types of clustering methods that can be applied to life sciences data sets, but there are no tools that provide analytic evaluation of the results of different clustering methods applied to the same data set," said John Hotchkiss, Chief Technology Officer at AnVil. "These SBIR grants will provide AnVil with resources to develop these tools, enabling researchers to determine the methods that provide optimal clustering for making informed decisions about a given data set."

About AnVil
AnVil is a pioneering life sciences discovery company that turns data into knowledge. AnVil partners with life sciences, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and healthcare companies, enabling them to see and interpret multiple data sets in integrated, information-rich views. This approach turns data into decision-quality information, generating informed decisions faster and more accurately. Anvil's combination of scientific perspective, expertise and high-dimensional technology uncovers the limitless possibilities within complex data sets.

AnVil is based in Burlington, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.anvilinfo.com, or call 1-781-272-1600. E-mail inquiries should be sent to: William Wiegler at wwiegler@anvilinfo.com.

Copyright © 2002 AnVil, Inc. All rights reserved.

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