IBM Teams With Life Sciences Company

IBM Corp., a company that has a history of research and reinventing itself, has made its first investment into the life sciences arena. The Armonk, N.Y.-based e-business services and technology provider is investing an undisclosed amount in Structural Bioinformatics Inc. (SBI), which owns three-dimensional protein models used for pharmaceutical research. The goal of the collaboration is to make the content of SBI's extensive databases of protein structural information more accessible to researchers via the Internet on a subscription basis. IBM has done extensive research on computational biology, which SBI will use. The two companies also will collaborate on marketing. In a release announcing the venture, IBM says the successful mapping of the human genome has accelerated the study of proteins and protein-protein interactions, or proteomics, by enabling the rapid conversion of gene sequence data into protein structures. SIB has offices and research facilities in San Diego, Cambridge, Mass.; and Horsholm, Denmark.