Bio-Rad and Infometrix to Release KnowItAll Metabolomics Software Solution to Aid in Drug Discovery

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (AMEX: BIO and BIOb) and Infometrix today announced plans to release the KnowItAll® Informatics System, Metabolomics Edition, integrating Infometrix' renowned Pirouette® chemometrics technology with Bio-Rad's award-winning KnowItAll® platform, databases and NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) tools.

The KnowItAll® Informatics System, Metabolomics Edition is the world's first end-to-end informatics and chemometrics system for metabolomics research.

"The KnowItAll® Metabolomics Edition leverages Bio-Rad's rich history of spectroscopic and cheminformatics technologies with our recent successes in the ADME/Tox market," said Gregory M. Banik, Ph.D., Bio-Rad's Informatics Division General Manager. "We look forward to continued development of state-of-the-art tools to facilitate research in metabolomics and metabonomics."

In addition to the Infometrix tools for multivariate data analysis, the KnowItAll® Metabolomics Edition incorporates Bio-Rad's new patent-pending Overlap Density Heatmap technology for comparative spectral visualization. The new product also includes a database of NMR spectra of common metabolites with Internet links to the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database, a prominent bioinformatics resource of metabolic pathways. The integration of these technologies will allow researchers performing metabolic profiling studies to easily manage and analyze data in their search for relevant biomarkers, which can be used to distinguish normal versus abnormal biological systems and response to drug treatment.

"The combination of Infometrix' Pirouette® chemometrics technology with Bio-Rad's KnowItAll® Informatics System offers important solutions for drug discovery researchers and for the future of metabolomics," said Brian Rohrback, Ph.D., President of Infometrix.

Metabolomics was named one of the top ten emerging technology areas by MIT Technology Review in May 2005. It was also named "the new up and coming - omics" in the May 2004 issue of Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Metabolomics blends statistical analysis with analytical chemistry techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), mass spectrometry (MS) and chromatography. Predicted to become the center of drug discovery and development, metabolomics may lead to earlier, faster and more accurate diagnosis of many diseases.