FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OPENEYE RELEASES NEW VERSION OF ITS AUTOMATIC LIGAND-FITTING TO CRYSTALLOGRAPHIC DENSITY APPLICATION AFITT

Santa Fe, NM, October 25th, 2007 - OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc., the developer of innovative molecular modeling and cheminformatics solutions for drug discovery, announced today it will release version 1.3 of its automatic ligand-fitting to density application AFITT at the 15th PSDI Workshop opening this Sunday in Autrans, France.

AFITT is the only application to offer a fully automatic ligand fitting process that optimizes a real-space fit to density while keeping conformational strain to a minimum. A number of crystallography software tools provide automated construction of 3D protein coordinates, but are less adept at handling ligand structures. "This is largely a consequence of the greater complexity of medicinal chemistry and chemical informatics compared with protein chemistry," explained Dr. Gregory Warren, Senior Applications Scientist at OpenEye. "At OpenEye, we approached the problem from the small molecule angle, as described in the literature [1]. That's how we make the difference."

"AFITT v1.3 is a major release," said Brian Kelley, Research Scientist / Senior Developer at OpenEye, and AFITT Product Manager. "The new GUI, inherited from the latest VIDA release, provides a higher level of intuitiveness and comfort, as well as compatibility with our plug-in utility, VIVANT. Density maps and structures can be displayed inside Microsoft^® PowerPoint^® and web pages using VIVANT." He continued: "We have also introduced a number of technological enhancements in density finding, protein modeling and refinement dictionary generation. But the most significant additions are probably the new command-line tools for both ligand-fitting (FLYNN) and refinement dictionary writing (WRITEDICT). Both programs have been seamlessly integrated into the crystallography program, Coot^®." He concluded: "This provides our users with powerful means for integration and automation, which are critical in the application of high-throughput crystallography to pharmaceutical lead identification."

At the PSDI workshop on October 28-30, Dr. Warren will give a product review entitled: "Automatic Ligand Conformer, Placement and Refinement Dictionary Generation Using AFITT", while Mr. Kelley will present a poster on the "Evaluation of Automated Ligand Placement Using AFITT."

References:

[1] S. Wlodek, A. G. Skillman and A. Nicholls, Acta Crystallographica D, D62, pp. 741-749 (2006).

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 geared 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 http://www.eyesopen.com.

For additional information

Matthew Stahl, Senior Vice President, Head of Strategic Development

+1-505-473-7385 x51

Email: business@eyesopen.com