Bio-IT World Reports on OpenEye's 'SAMPL' Blind Challenge in Its May Issue

SANTA FE, N.M.--(Business Wire)--
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
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 www.eyesopen.com.

OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc.
Matthew Stahl
Senior Vice President, Head of Strategic Development
+1 505-473-7385 x51
business@eyesopen.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008