Insilicos - Biomarker Discovery Software | Insilicos Awarded Grant for Life Science Computing |

Seattle, 5 May, 2008 - Seattle biotech company Insilicos announced today that the National Institutes of Health has awarded the firm a research grant to improve medical research data management software. Insilicos will use a service developed by Amazon.com to offer researchers web-based access to advanced data management tools. This is the seventh federal grant Insilicos has been awarded. In total, the company has won over $2.5 million in grants.

Insilicos will be using open source software developed by Seattle company LabKey. LabKey developed this software for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to manage and organize data for cancer research. This software allows researchers to parse huge volumes of data and find medically relevant conclusions, such as finding specific proteins that increase in the blood of people with cancer or heart disease.

"In medical research, data analysis is often the bottleneck," said Insilicos President Erik Nilsson. "This work is particularly exciting, because many biomedical researchers don't have an in-house database expert. With this solution, they don't need one --they can manage the whole process from a web browser and get their results right away."

In this project, Insilicos will be using the "cloud computing" services of Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. Cloud computing allows one company to scale up a web service as demand grows, using computers provided by a different company. Customers gain low-cost, high-reliability solutions, without having to install any software.

"Cloud computing is a favored approach for high performance web services," said Insilicos Vice President of Informatics Brian Pratt. "This is another sign of the web growing up as a business environment. What's interesting about this project is, we take a technology model that is mostly used for public-facing web services, and we use it to help out researchers deep in basic science." Insilicos thinks web services will deliver a decisive advantage. “Nobody wants to install and manage complex software systems if they don’t have to,” continued Pratt. “Salesforce.com proved that for salespeople. In our experience, it’s just as true for biologists.”

Insilicos LLC provides services for biomedical research and clinical diagnostics. For more information, visit the Insilicos web site www.insilicos.com.

Amazon Web Services empowers software developers with the tools and support to innovate and build businesses that leverage Amazon's technology platform using standard web services technologies. Amazon Web Services provides developers the opportunity to replace existing infrastructure and scale up or down based on resource demands. This flexibility allows developers to run their businesses at "web-scale"--uninhibited by growth. For more information, visit aws.amazon.com.

LabKey builds open source systems to help scientists collect, analyze, and share data from high-throughput experiments and observational studies. LabKey is a for-profit business based in Seattle, housed in and partly owned by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. For more information, visit www.labkey.com.

Insilicos LLC develops life science software for pharmaceutical development, biological research and clinical diagnostics.
For more information, visit the Insilicos web site www.insilicos.com or contact Insilicos at info@insilicos.com. 'Insilicos' and 'Life Science Software' are trademarks of Insilicos LLC.