Accelrys Announces Proposed Strategic Project With General Motors and U.S. Department of Energy

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 2 -- Accelrys, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pharmacopeia Inc. , today announced its participation with General Motors (GM) in a proposed three-year U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)- sponsored, multi-company research project. GM announced the project, which will focus on the application of new research technologies to automotive catalysts, on October 2nd, highlighting the strategic nature of this alliance. Other major sub-contractors are Engelhard Corporation, Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The program will help to pioneer the use of high throughput experimentation to identify materials that catalytically reduce NOx pollutants in lean diesel automotive exhaust to harmless nitrogen gas. The goal is cleaner air via a new emissions control system that allows advanced CIDI (compression-ignition, direct-injection) diesel engines to achieve future U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions targets.

The Accelrys Consulting group is expected to tailor innovative software tools for data management and the study of structure/property relationships. Such informatics software is critical, since the state-of-the-art experimental techniques to be applied in the program rapidly generate huge quantities of data. Accelrys software will store, analyze and visualize this data, and then help project teams to manage and apply resultant information and knowledge. By analogy to the better-known fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics, this technology as applied to materials is termed ``matinformatics.''

Dr. Richard J. Blint, Senior Staff Research Scientist at The General Motors Research and Development Center and Principal Program Investigator, states, ``The range of informatics capabilities gathered within Accelrys satisfies the needs of this discovery program exceptionally well.'' Dennis Minano, GM Vice President, Environment and Energy, and Chief Environmental Officer, also comments, ``A discovery of a new lean NOx catalyst, coupled with the use of appropriate fuels, could improve the chances for diesel-powered passenger vehicles to meet low emissions requirements.''

Dr. Michael Stapleton, Chief Operating Office at Accelrys, comments, ``We are delighted to be among the world-leading companies that will participate in this program. This innovative project takes technology that is revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry and applies it to a new application that is critical to protection of the environment. Our involvement reflects our leadership in the established pharmaceutical arena, and particularly in expanding the use of informatics into materials science and the chemicals process Industries.''

Accelrys Inc.

Accelrys is a subsidiary of Pharmacopeia, Inc. . Accelrys offers market-leading software solutions for bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and modeling for the life and materials sciences. Accelrys Consulting Services provides expert assistance in the configuration, implementation and integration of a wide variety of software solutions to enable superior research and discovery. For more information visit: www.accelrys.com.