MDL INTRODUCES CHESHIRE FOR ISIS

 CONTACT: Corbin Collins
 MDL Information Systems, Inc.
 (510) 895-1313, ext. 1371
 corbin |-at-| mdli.com
 http://www.mdli.com
 European mirror site:
 http://www.mdli.co.uk
 MDL INTRODUCES CHESHIRE FOR ISIS, A CHEMICAL
 INTERPRETATION ENVIRONMENT FOR INDUSTRY-LEADING ISIS
 --Companies Can Create Cheminformatics Business Rules, Automate the Analysis
 and Manipulation of Large Volumes of Chemical Information--
 SAN LEANDRO, California--March 17, 1999--MDL Information Systems, Inc. today
 introduced Cheshire, a sophisticated chemical representation component that
 tightly integrates a powerful chemical scripting language into the
 industry-standard ISIS (Integrated Scientific Information System) framework.
 Cheshire provides a software development environment for building abstract
 and complex business rules that automate the analysis and interpretation of
 chemical structures and that calculate chemical information from chemical
 structures. The system is designed for chemical registration, data mining,
 property prediction, and sophisticated chemical representation controls
 within custom cheminformatics applications. Cheshire runs on both client and
 server platforms within the ISIS family of products, and is portable to
 future MDL architectures. MDL will demonstrate Cheshire at the meeting of
 the American Chemical Society, March 22-24, booth 819, Anaheim Convention
 Center.
 Cheshire includes Cheshire Studio, an interactive prototyping environment
 that developers can use to build, edit, and run scripts executed by the
 Cheshire runtime environment, the workhorse of the Cheshire system. The
 Cheshire runtime environment is exposed to users and developers directly
 through several programs in the ISIS family of products--ISIS/Base,
 ISIS/Object Library, ISIS for Microsoft Excel, ISIS/Host Application Program
 Interface (API), ISIS Procedural Language (PL), and Chemscape. This
 accessibility allows Cheshire to plug-and-play with existing discovery
 systems and support the breadth of scientific applications used within the
 pharmaceutical, chemical, and biotech industries.
 Cheshire enables high-level functions that can operate on entire collections
 of atoms and bonds, not just individual atoms and bonds. For the developer,
 this high-level abstraction makes the scripting language intuitive and easy
 to program. For the end user, the abstraction enables high-level operations
 such as exploring molecular fingerprints to aid in structure-activity
 relationship studies.
 Cheshire's scripting language is modeled on Javascript, allowing the use of
 familiar programming constructs such as objects, methods, and properties.
 Cheshire comes standard with a library of sample scripts, including a part
 of the chemical representation conversion rules MDL uses when building
 databases such as the Available Chemicals Directory. The system also comes
 with valuable example utilities, including an ISIS/Base add-in that provides
 scientists working in ISIS/Base off-the-shelf access to Cheshire
 capabilities. Users can extend ISIS/Base immediately with a sophisticated
 chemical interpretation component to calculate physicochemical data from
 structures, which helps scientists analyze chemical structures that would
 otherwise require tedious manual inspection.
 "In our view, Cheshire is based on a set of abstract concepts including
 'collections' and 'mappings' within an object-oriented framework," said Dr
 Upali Bandara, business analyst, ZDW Scientific Information, BASF
 Aktiengesellschaft. "The combination of these concepts with the rich
 dictionary of basic operations allows Cheshire to cover all
 the business rules we need in the process of structure registration. The
 Cheshire Studio will help us to do the programming and testing in a
 remarkably efficient way."
 "Cheshire fits into multiple discovery environments where different
 scientists and programmers can use it to automate tasks related to in-depth
 chemical structure processing in numerous ways," said Rudy Potenzone,
 senior
 vice president of product development at MDL. "The system's robust chemical
 intelligence and its sophisticated methods for analyzing and interpreting
 chemistry not only enhance core ISIS products but interoperate easily in a
 variety of ways with other MDL systems. We designed Cheshire to help
 research organizations build a comprehensive and integrated discovery
 informatics framework."
 The ISIS Family and Complementary Systems
 For the past seven years, ISIS solutions have provided an information
 management architecture that supports the registration, retrieval, display,
 and analysis of all types of scientific information. Pharmaceutical,
 biotech, agrochemical, and chemical industries worldwide use ISIS
 applications, which support compound-discovery research and development.
 Cheshire works with
 *  ISIS/Draw, a chemically intelligent drawing program
 *  ISIS/Base, a forms-based desktop database management system and/or
    client for querying and accessing corporate data sources through
 ISIS/Host
 *  ISIS/Object Library, an OLE interface to ISIS on the client
 *  ISIS/Host API, a programmable interface to the ISIS/Host integration
    engine on the server
 *  ISIS/PL, a programming language within ISIS on the client and the
    server
 *  ISIS for Microsoft Excel, a data analysis tool that combines the
    spreadsheet environment of Excel with the chemical structure handling
    capabilities of ISIS
 *  Chemscape, a Web-based system that provides complete ISIS structure
    and data searching capabilities from within Web browsers
 Cheshire also integrates with other MDL products, including
 *  Reagent Selector, MDL's new system for selecting and obtaining
    reagents
 *  Central Library, MDL's solution for combinatorial chemistry
 *  The Spotfire product suite, systems for the interactive
    visualization of large data sets and chemical structures
 About MDL
 MDL Information Systems, Inc. is the recognized leader in discovery
 informatics for the life science and chemical industries. MDL software,
 content, and services provide the enterprise framework for identifying
 successful new products. A wholly owned subsidiary of Elsevier Science, MDL
 has offices worldwide with headquarters in San Leandro, California.
 ###
 Chemscape and MDL are registered trademarks and Available Chemicals
 Directory, Central Library, Cheshire, ISIS, ISIS/Object Library, and Reagent
 Selector are trademarks of MDL Information Systems, Inc. Microsoft is a
 registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation. Spotfire is a registered
 trademark of Spotfire, Inc. All other product names may be registered
 trademarks or trademarks of their respective holders.
 Dori Luzbetak
 Web Communications Manager
 Marketing Communications
 MDL Information Systems, Inc.
 14600 Catalina Street
 San Leandro, CA 94577
 (510) 895-1313 x1652
 (510) 614-3608 - FAX
 dori |-at-| mdli.com