Government agency responsible for administration and processing if IP in Canada to use GenomeQuest™ as genomic sequence knowledge source for biotech patent examiners

Worcester, Massachusetts - September 21, 2005 – In the latest of a series of new client signings, Gene-IT, a leader in genome-scale sequence comparison and mining software and managed services, today announced that it has signed an agreement to license its flagship GenomeQuest™ offering to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). GenomeQuest is a genomic information service and software application that provides sequence comparison solutions for biological and patent investigators.

With CIPO’s increased recognition as an international intellectual property (IP) search authority, the organization’s ability to provide up-to-the-minute, accurate information becomes even more important. GenomeQuest will enable CIPO’s biotech examiners to participate in searching the most recent patent records using both biological and IP-sensitive search methods.

CIPO is a special operating agency of Industry Canada, and is the government body responsible for the administration of the greater part of the intellectual property system in Canada. The terms of the agreement call for Gene-IT to provide access to GenomeQuest services for all IP examiners in CIPO’s biotech practice. GenomeQuest enables users to perform simultaneous, large-scale genomic and proteomic sequence comparisons, and rapidly obtain a structured presentation of the best-fit answers drawn from the most up-to-date sources of global patent information.

Ron Ranauro, CEO of Gene-IT, said, “We are very pleased to be selected as the IP search solution for the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. The adoption of our offering by a growing number of issuing patent authorities is a major endorsement of GenomeQuest. We are delighted to provide CIPO’s biotech IP examiners with its capabilities.

GenomeQuest provides automated search capability and context-sensitive views of sequence information. The system couples sequence retrieval with sequence comparison for inter- and cross-species comparison of up-to-date biological and patent reference data. End-users initiate questions by retrieving sequence records using text identifiers, gene names, patent numbers and other keywords, and immediately cross-compare them with new information contained in and linked to sequence alignments.