FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BIO-IT WORLD REPORTS ON OPENEYE'S 'SAMPL' BLIND CHALLENGE IN ITS MAY ISSUE

Santa Fe, NM, May 20th, 2008 - OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc., the developer of innovative molecular modeling and cheminformatics solutions for drug discovery research, announced today that a report on the first edition of its SAMPL blind challenge was published in the May issue of Bio-IT World.

The Statistical Assessment of the Modeling of Proteins and Ligands (SAMPL) challenge is a blind test of protein and ligand modeling. Its purpose is to analyze the performance a variety of modeling methods on data not seen by participants. The methodology of the challenge forced participants to make prospective predictions as opposed to retrospective analyses. SAMPL-1 focused on virtual screening, prediction of binding poses and binding energies and calculation of transfer energies. "The key to SAMPL's success," says Dr. Anthony Nicholls, CEO of OpenEye, "has been the generous donation of previously unreleased data from a number of pharmaceutical companies and the efforts of our collaborators Peter Guthrie and CCG."

Dr. Geoffrey Skillman, Vice President of Research at OpenEye, and the organizer of SAMPL-1, commented: "We were very pleased to have over 50 participants, evenly split between academia and industry. Having professional industrial modelers comparing a diverse range of modeling software they use everyday lends a 'real world' dimension to the SAMPL assessment that isn't often seen in similar validation studies. We hope that an increased exposure of the event in the media, such as with this article in Bio-IT World, will lead to even greater participation in the future."

SAMPL-2 is already being scheduled for early 2009. The results will be presented at OpenEye's 10th annual customers, users and programmers meeting (CUP X), held in Santa Fe, NM on March 8-11, 2009.

About OpenEye

OpenEye Scientific Software Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with offices in Boston, Massachusetts and Strasbourg, France. It was founded in 1997 to develop large-scale modeling applications and toolkits. Primarily aimed towards drug discovery and design, areas of application include chemical informatics, structure generation, docking, shape comparison, charge & electrostatics and visualization. The software is designed for scientific rigor, as well as speed, scalability and platform independence. OpenEye makes most of its technology available as toolkits - programming libraries suitable for custom development. OpenEye software typically is distributable across multiple processors, supports 64-bit processing, and runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, as well as HP, IBM, SGI and SUN flavors of UNIX. For further information on the company and its products, see www.eyesopen.com.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Matthew Stahl, Senior Vice President, Head of Strategic Development
+1 505-473-7385 x51
Email: business@eyesopen.com