Immunetrics Licenses Disease-modeling Technology from University of Pittsburgh that Captures, for the First Time, the Complexity of the Inflammatory Process

"The Immunetrics mathematical modeling approach should be enormously valuable to companies seeking to address this challenging problem."

- Mitchell P. Fink, MD, Chair
Department of Critical Care Medicine
University of Pittsburgh

Technology expected to accelerate drug discovery process for inflammatory indications, enhancing selection of lead compounds and optimizing clinical-trial design for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies

PITTSBURGH, Pa. Dec. 19, 2002 — Immunetrics, Inc. (www.immunetrics.com), announced today it has secured an exclusive license to a University of Pittsburgh technology for a unique in silico predictive software simulation process that models — for the first time — the inflammatory response in humans. The inflammatory response is widely recognized as a fundamental trigger in sepsis, a frequently fatal condition that afflicts about 750,000 Americans each year. By enhancing the selection of lead compounds and by optimizing clinical trial design, the Company believes that its technology will accelerate the development of new therapeutic agents designed to modulate the inflammatory response.

Licensed exclusively from the University of Pittsburgh, a world leader in critical care medicine, the Immunetrics technology is based on three years of research and is being offered to pharma and biotech companies as a way of optimizing development of new drugs that combat inflammatory diseases such as sepsis, to help clinicians optimize therapeutic intervention and other treatment options.

"Completion of the license culminates an 18 month initiative to commercialize the technology by LaunchCyte. We sponsored animal studies to help validate and calibrate Pitt's model and created Immunetrics as a vehicle for driving it to market as a drug discovery tool," said Tom Petzinger, Jr. Chairman of LaunchCyte, Immunetrics' parent company.

"Immunetrics models the time course of sepsis in terms of clinically relevant pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines and effector mechanisms. The software tracks this complex set of information and then helps us understand how various therapeutic interventions are affected during their time course," said Steven Chang, CEO of Immunetrics.

"While our model of inflammation will be used to fill a significant need in the drug discovery process, it also can be used to assist companies in developing clinical diagnostics to support use of their therapies, as well as to devise appropriate cocktail therapies, and to resurrect failed compounds," said Mr. Chang. He added, "Immunetrics is the first and only company offering such a model for inflammatory response."

A recent analysis by Frost & Sullivan —"U.S. In Silico Simulation of Biological Systems Markets" (www.biotech.frost.com) — documents the importance of "disease modeling" in drug discovery. With the potential to lower the risk and financial burden of clinical trials, technologies that use computers to model and simulate biological systems are revolutionizing the drug discovery field. Indeed, demand for technologies that enable researchers to model and simulate biological pathways, cells, tissue, and diseases could push total market revenues to more than $6 billion by 2008, according to the Frost & Sullivan report.

Immunetrics was established by LaunchCyte LLC of Pittsburgh, a two-year-old company that creates, seeds, and harvests life science innovations from top US academic institutions. LaunchCyte portfolio companies have affiliations in place with four leading academic institutions in addition to the University of Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, Indiana University, and University of Pennsylvania.

© 2007 Immunetrics