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AxCell Biosciences/IBM Explore Pathways To Disease

AxCell Biosciences, a subsidiary of Cytogen Corporation, has announced that it is using IBM DB2 database technology to help its scientists chart the communication pathways within cells that enable proteins to interact and cause or prevent diseases.

AxCell researchers are using IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner to gain new insights into how proteins interact in complex cellular communication networks. Ultimately, this knowledge could help drug makers design more effective and less toxic drugs that can disrupt the communication systems of abnormal proteins without harming healthy cells.

DB2 Intelligent Miner provides powerful mining algorithms that can sift through massive amounts of data and uncover associations, patterns, and trends that can lead to scientific discovery. For example, clustering algorithms enable researchers to segment data with similar patterns, while predictive algorithms can score data by factors such as likelihood of risk or behavioral propensity. DB2 Intelligent Miner also includes time-sequence algorithms that can reveal examples of similar progressions of a disease over a period of time.

"AxCell's decision to go with DB2 Intelligent Miner technology was based on IBM's unparalleled strengths in data mining and commitment to the life sciences industry," said Michael D. Becker, interim chief executive officer of AxCell Biosciences. "Intelligent Miner's algorithms -- for clustering and predictive analyses, for example -- will help AxCell study sequence-function relationship, and potentially speed up domain and ligand identification for drug discovery. This technology will help give AxCell the competitive edge that comes from having a comprehensive source of information on domain-ligand mediated protein pathways."

AxCell will also augment its new internal data mining system with IBM DiscoveryLink data integration software. DiscoveryLink provides customers with a federated approach to data management, enabling them to access, manage and analyze data wherever it resides -- regardless of the database or data type. Using DiscoveryLink, AxCell researchers can perform simultaneous queries against multiple data sources -- accessing data in different formats and files -- and get results quickly delivered in a consolidated, consistent format, without actually moving the data or changing its underlying structure.

AxCell's systems biology approach to drug discovery involves the efficient identification of peptide ligands that bind to modular domains on signaling proteins. These peptides are used to identify additional signaling proteins, which share that domain. Bioinformatic analysis of the ligands and signaling proteins leads to identification of additional peptides and proteins and the pathways in which they are active. This may lead to identification of targets that can be validated in biological models and formatted in high-throughput assays to screen against natural product and small molecule libraries for potential inhibitors or modulators of these validated targets.

"IBM's relationship with AxCell is an opportunity to showcase technologies that have earned us a leadership position in data management," said Dr. Sharon Nunes, director, IBM Life Sciences Solutions Development. "These solutions are helping AxCell broaden its internal research capabilities and offer its research collaborators a comprehensive source of knowledge about protein pathways that can be used to design new drugs that fight diseases more effectively."

In addition to deploying DB2 Intelligent Miner Technology and DiscoveryLink, IBM and AxCell expect to explore research collaborations in areas such as visualization, pattern discovery and protein folding analysis.

About IBM Life Sciences

IBM Life Sciences brings together IBM resources, from research, services and e-business expertise to data and storage management and high-performance computing to offer new solutions for the life sciences market, including biotechnology, genomic, e-health, pharmaceutical, and agri-science industries. The fastest way to get more information about IBM Life Sciences is through its Web site, www.ibm.com/solutions/ lifesciences.

About AxCell Biosciences

AxCell Biosciences of Newtown, PA, a subsidiary of Cytogen Corporation, is engaged in the research and development of novel biopharmaceutical products using its growing portfolio of functional proteomics solutions and collection of proprietary signal transduction pathway information. Through the systematic and industrialized measurement of protein-to-protein interactions, AxCell is assembling ProChart, a proprietary database of signal transduction pathway information that is relevant in a number of therapeutically important classes of molecules including growth factors, receptors and other potential protein therapeutics or drug targets. AxCell's database content and functional proteomics tools are available on a nonexclusive basis to biotechnology, pharmaceutical and academic researchers. AxCell is expanding and accelerating its research activities to further elucidate the role of novel proteins and pathways in ProChart, through both external collaborations and internal data mining. As previously announced, Cytogen is reviewing strategic alternatives for AxCell Biosciences that would allow Cytogen to reduce its cash burn in order to leverage its prostate cancer franchise. For additional information on AxCell Biosciences, visit www.axcellbio.com.

About Cytogen Corporation

Cytogen Corporation of Princeton, NJ, is a biopharmaceutical company with an established and growing product line in prostate cancer and other areas of oncology. Currently marketed products include ProstaScint (a monoclonal antibody-based imaging agent used to image the extent and spread of prostate cancer); BrachySeed I-125 and Pd-103 (two uniquely designed, next- generation radioactive seed implants for the treatment of localized prostate cancer); and Quadramet (a skeletal targeting therapeutic radiopharmaceutical marketed for the relief of bone pain in prostate and other types of cancer). Cytogen is evolving a pipeline of oncology product candidates by developing its prostate specific membrane antigen, or PSMA, technologies, which are exclusively licensed from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. For more information, visit www.cytogen.com.