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April 23, 2012
NextBio Clinical Extends Life Sciences Platform From the Bench to Translational Medicine

—NextBio Clinical Correlates Patient Clinical and Genomic Data to Experimental '-Omics' to Aid Translational Research and Biomarker Discovery—

SANTA CLARA, CA: NextBio today unveiled NextBio Clinical, an extension of the company's existing life sciences platform to translational medicine applications such as biomarker discovery and clinical trial optimization. Adding curated genomic, molecular and clinical profiles from thousands of individual patients to the platform's existing repository of data from animal and cell line models, NextBio Clinical enables the earlier application of clinical information to enhance research and development.

"Since 2004, NextBio has been addressing the research needs of scientists at academic institutions, pharmaceutical and biotech companies with our cross-technology platform for integrative data analysis," says Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "Now, with NextBio Clinical, we directly address the challenges of taking genomics into clinical research for the development of therapeutics and companion diagnostics. By providing patient-centric data and analysis, we facilitate biomarker-driven research that can accelerate the process of translational drug discovery."

Mr. Akhtari concluded, "With the growing availability and decreasing cost of obtaining individual patient data moving genomics into clinical applications, NextBio Clinical is a natural extension for both our platform and our clients who have been using NextBio in their research for many years."

Applying Genomics to Translational Medicine

NextBio Clinical aggregates and correlates terabyte-scale collections of private and public cross-platform 'omics' data, experimental data from cell lines and other sources, and clinical data from individual patients and population studies. Controlled vocabularies and the platform's semantic framework eliminate confounding gene, disease and compound annotations, facilitating applications of this content at all stages of research, from early stage experimentation to repositioning approved drugs.

"With efforts such as The Cancer Genome Atlas, the International Cancer Genome Consortium and others, the growth of patient-level data in the public domain has been enormous. Simultaneously, efforts like the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia are transforming our understanding of pharmacogenomics with cell line models. We are excited about the potential of integrating these diverse data within the framework of NextBio Clinical," said Ilya Kupershmidt, co-founder and Vice President of Products at NextBio.

Organizations can use the NextBio Clinical platform to accelerate drug discovery by applying human biology earlier in the discovery process, to discover and develop predictive biomarkers, and to optimize clinical trial design and patient selection to reduce development timelines and increase the chance of successful approval for new therapies.

Mr. Kupershmidt added, "By enabling our users to bring patient genomic data into the clinical development process at an early stage, we hope to help improve the pace and success rate at which biomarker-based therapeutics are approved for clinical use."

NextBio Clinical at Bio-IT World 2012

Ilya Kupershmidt, Co-founder and VP of Products at NextBio, will describe NextBio Clinical in his talk at Bio-IT World 2012, titled "Patient-centered solutions for translational medicine" on Wednesday April 25, 2012 from 3:00-3:15 p.m. The meeting is being held in Boston, MA at the World Trade Center from April 24-26.

NextBio representatives are also available for additional information or product demos at Booth 326 in the exhibit hall.

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October 14, 2011
Drug Safety, Efficacy, and Potential New Cancer Biomarker Predicted by NextBio

—NextBio's Unique Capabilities for Life Science Discovery and Clinical Insights from Genomic Data Highlighted at ASHG/ICHG Meeting—

SANTA CLARA, CA: New research presented this week highlights the ability of NextBio to help life scientists and clinicians investigate publicly available genomic data to assess biological mechanisms underlying drug toxicity, as well as discover prospective cancer biomarkers for further validation. The unique capabilities of NextBio to search and make discoveries, not possible by other methods, from the massive amounts of genomic data increasingly available in the public domain is the subject of two poster presentations at the American Society of Human Genetics/International Congress of Human Genetics meeting in Montreal, October 11-15.

In one presentation, the authors showed how NextBio's web-based tools and integrative genomics data could be used to evaluate potential drug toxicities and suggest treatment alternatives for women experiencing "hot flashes" (vasomotor symptoms) as a result of breast cancer chemotherapy. In another presentation, NextBio authors demonstrated how genomic data from disparate sources could be brought together and analyzed on the NextBio platform to suggest a potential new cancer biomarker in a region of the genome previously termed a "gene desert".

Drug Toxicity, Alternative Therapy Identified by NextBio

NextBio analysis offers the potential to inform clinical medicine through its ability to predict drug toxicities, as illustrated by a study of tibolone, a drug widely used to treat menopausal vasomotor symptoms. In 2009, a clinical trial tested this drug as a potential therapy for similar symptoms in women undergoing breast cancer treatment. The trial was cut short early because of the significant increase in cancer recurrence observed in those women.

The authors' investigation of public genomic data curated by NextBio found positive correlations between tibolone-induced gene expression changes and those seen in breast cancer, as well as similarities to the gene expression profiles of estradiol hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which is contraindicated in patients with breast cancer. A similar analysis for gabapentin, another drug used to treat vasomotor symptoms, showed gene expression changes that are not correlated with breast cancer, HRT, or tibolone signatures, suggesting that gabapentin may offer a better alternative to tibolone for patients with breast cancer.

"Together, these and other analyses performed as part of this study demonstrate that NextBio's web-based tools and integrative genomics data can aid applications such as assessment of potential drug efficacy or adverse effects," said Helen Wang, NextBio scientist and lead author of the study.

Identification of Potential New Cancer Biomarker

A second study presented by NextBio showed how using genomic data curated from publicly available sources; researchers could perform in silico analysis to identify a possible new cancer biomarker in a portion of the genome previously known as a "gene desert".

Cellular changes involved in cancer are not unlike those involved in creating stem cells from adult tissues like skin. In both cases, cells re-gain the ability to multiply rapidly, and lose certain characteristics of adult, differentiated tissues. Analyzing data integrated from studies of genomic changes in stem cells with studies of several cancer types, the group identified a poorly characterized gene that was highly up-regulated in both cancer cells and stem cells, but not normal mature or otherwise differentiated cells.

"NextBio offers an unprecedented opportunity for life scientists to find correlations and make new findings from the rapidly rising mountains of publicly available genomic data, as well as from their own research results," said Ilya Kupershmidt, NextBio vice president of products. "As we enter the era of the $1000 genome, the NextBio platform can provide an important resource for analyzing and understanding genomic data from disparate sources, leading to new knowledge and the potential for better decision making for life science researchers, drug developers, and clinicians alike."

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September 12, 2011
University of Southern California Licenses NextBio Enterprise for Campus-Wide Use

CUPERTINO, CA: NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, announced that the University of Southern California (USC) has licensed NextBio Enterprise for research use by students and faculty. The University plans to promote use of the NextBio research platform campus-wide beginning in August.

NextBio already offers academic institutions access to its large collection of continuously curated genomic data and enhanced data and literature search functions, but the NextBio Enterprise platform provides additional functionality and support for cross-disciplinary collaboration and translational research. NextBio's Vice President of Engineering, Satnam Alag explains, "USC users of NextBio Enterprise can access our APIs, import unlimited amounts of their own data, and interpret it in the context of our semantically integrated library to make novel insights. As with all NextBio Enterprise users, we offer them hands-on support and training sessions to make the most of our technology for their research"

Using vertical apps like Body Atlas and Pharmaco Atlas, researchers can make relevant correlations between their own results and existing genomic data for multiple tissues, compounds, diseases and more. "This functionality is essential to an institution like USC that emphasizes cross-disciplinary collaboration and the translation of discoveries into meaningful practice," says Satnam.

"USC is one of America's leading research institutions, with collaborative initiatives in fields such as Clinical & Translational Health Sciences, Human Health and Neuroscience, among others- all fields that will benefit from NextBio's ability to facilitate searching, discovering and sharing knowledge," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "We are pleased that USC has chosen to join the growing number of leading academic, public and corporate research institutions that have made NextBio an integral part of their research efforts."

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May 18, 2011
NextBio is a Finalist for the 2011 Red Herring Top 100 North America Award

CUPERTINO, CA: NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, announced today it has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring's Top 100 North America award, a prestigious list honoring the year's most promising private technology ventures from the North American business region.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across North America. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the "buzz" and make the list a valuable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

"This year was very rewarding," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "The global economic situation has abated and there are many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products. We had a very difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. NextBio shows great promise therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we're faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring North America. We know that the 2011 crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to make an impact."

"NextBio's goal is to enable life scientists to deal effectively with the rising mountain of genomic data and its efficient use in life science research, drug discovery and clinical development, and ultimately, personalized medicine," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "This recognition by Red Herring further validates the innovative nature of our work as well as our growing commercial success."

Finalists for the 2011 edition of the Red Herring 100 North America award are selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. The Finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring North America Forum in Hollywood, California, June 13-15, 2011. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony the evening of June 15 at the event.

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May 4, 2011
NextBio Appoints Former Yahoo! CTO Farzad (Zod) Nazem to Board of Directors

CUPERTINO, CA: NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, announced the appointment of Farzad (Zod) Nazem to the NextBio Board of Directors.

"As the former Chief Technology Officer at Yahoo!, Zod gained tremendous expertise in building highly scalable systems to deal with large and ever-growing volumes of information. This experience will be extremely valuable to NextBio as we create new systems to deal with the rising mountain of genomic data and its efficient use in life science research, drug discovery and clinical development, and ultimately, personalized medicine," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "In addition, his experience in growing Oracle and Yahoo from small to very large, industry leading companies will be an important business resource for us as NextBio enters its next stage of growth.

"We are clearly entering the next stage of the genomics revolution as researchers and drug developers begin to apply this data to improve the clinical development and use of drugs," said Farzad Nazem."I am excited about NextBio's potential to play a leading role in bringing about the effective use of genomics data for preventive, personalized medicine."

Mr. Nazem served as Yahoo!'s Chief Technology Officer from 1996 until his retirement in 2007. He is credited with building the massively scalable and cost-effective site operations that allowed 600 million users to make Yahoo! their home in cyberspace. Prior to joining Yahoo! Mr. Nazem spent 11 years with Oracle Corporation as Vice President of the Media and Web Server Division and a member of the Product Division's Management Committee. Prior to Oracle, he held various technical positions at Sydis, Inc. and Rolm Corporation. He earned a B.S. degree in Computer Science with highest honors from California Polytechnic State University.

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April 6, 2011
NextBio Facilitates Additional Search Capabilities on Elsevier SciVerse Applications through Launch of Two New Applications

CUPERTINO, CA: NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, announced the launch of two new applications on the Elsevier SciVerse platform. The new applications, reflecting the successful ongoing collaboration between NextBio and Elsevier, further demonstrate NextBio's capabilities for searching for relevant text in all types of content at the document, section, paragraph and sentence level. SciVerse is an innovative platform that integrates Elsevier's key products and encourages the scientific community to collaborate on the development of customized search and discovery applications.

The two new applications include:

• SearchAssist: An application that leverages NextBio's auto-complete API and provides auto-complete suggestions composed of terms gathered from diseases, compounds, drugs, anatomy, organisms, genes, biogroups, SNPs (over 18 million), author names (over 6 million) and other biological concepts. It leverages a number of open ontologies including MeSH, Snomed CT, PubChem, DrugBank, and Gene Ontology.
• Section Search application: An application that decomposes an article into eight sections: Title, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Summary, and Captions. A user can search through one or more of these sections to retrieve articles of interest and further filter their results using faceted (Year, Journals, Authors, and Affiliations) navigation.

These new applications add to the three previous applications — Matching Sentences, Methods Search, and Prolific Authors — that NextBio launched on the Elsevier SciVerse platform in September 2010.

"This suite of NextBio applications on SciVerse demonstrates how NextBio technology and APIs can be leveraged to build a variety of useful applications," said Satnam Alag, NextBio Vice President of Engineering. "They also effectively demonstrate NextBio's capabilities for searching for relevant text at multiple levels within all types of content, not just content within the life and health sciences."

"The new applications furthermore show the power of our applications framework , by which technology companies and academic developers can leverage our APIs and our content to build new solutions that enhance the search and discovery experience of our users," said Rafael Sidi, Vice President, Application Marketplace and Developer Network, Elsevier.

"NextBio's expertise in text-based search, ontology management, and semantic enrichment of content also very nicely complements our company's own unique data search and correlations engine," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. "We have invested in building a comprehensive suite of APIs to enable our partners and customers to build their own applications, as illustrated by the SearchAssist application."

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively. For more information about SciVerse please visit http://www.info.sciverse.com/.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

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March 21, 2011
NextBio Continues Market Momentum as Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute Renews and Expands License to NextBio Enterprise

—New Agreement Enlarges User-Base and Adds Access to NextBio Sequence-Centric Module—

CUPERTINO, CA: NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, announced that Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute has renewed and expanded its license to NextBio Enterprise. The new agreement both expands the Institute's user-base for NextBio and adds access to the Sequence-Centric Module that enables the exploration and utilization of massive amounts of public and internally generated sequencing data. NextBio Enterprise with the Sequence Centric Module allows organizations to create corporate-wide genomic data platforms to serve the needs of their global research teams.

"As an organization whose mission is understanding disease at the molecular level, NextBio has become an essential tool for the Stanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute's scientific efforts, enabling our researchers to quickly examine and understand their data in the context of huge quantities of information from both Institute studies and public research worldwide," said Dr. Craig Hauser, Vice President for Scientific Resources. "Three years of experience in using NextBio has convinced us of its strong value to our work, and we look forward to giving our scientists increased ability to examine diverse data using a single research platform through the NextBio Sequence-Centric Module."

"Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute has been a pioneering user and supporter of NextBio since our earliest days and has repeatedly expanded its license and access to NextBio as we have added new capabilities to our research platform," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "We are very pleased to see that the Institute has made NextBio Enterprise an integral part of its research efforts to generate hypotheses, design experiments, and, ultimately, make major discoveries."

About Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute

Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute is dedicated to discovering the fundamental molecular causes of disease and devising the innovative therapies of tomorrow. Sanford-Burnham, with operations in California and Florida, is one of the fastest-growing research institutes in the country. The Institute ranks among the top independent research institutions nationally for NIH grant funding and among the top organizations worldwide for its research impact. From 1999 - 2009, Sanford-Burnham ranked #1 worldwide among all types of organizations in the fields of biology and biochemistry for the impact of its research publications, defined by citations per publication, according to the Institute for Scientific Information. According to government statistics, Sanford-Burnham ranks #2 nationally among all organizations in capital efficiency of generating patents, defined by the number of patents issued per grant dollars awarded.

Sanford-Burnham utilizes a unique, collaborative approach to medical research and has established major research programs in cancer, neurodegeneration, diabetes, and infectious, inflammatory, and childhood diseases. The Institute is especially known for its world-class capabilities in stem cell research and drug discovery technologies. Sanford-Burnham is a nonprofit public benefit corporation. For more information, please visit www.sanfordburnham.org.

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September 28, 2010
NextBio Launches Three New Scientific Search Applications on the Elsevier SciVerse Platform

CUPERTINO, CA: NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, announced the launch of three new applications on the Elsevier SciVerse platform. SciVerse is an innovative new platform that integrates Elsevier's key products and encourages the scientific community to collaborate on the development of customized search and discovery applications.

"These three new applications show the power of NextBio's text-based search capabilities and are applicable to content beyond Life Sciences and Health Sciences," said Dr. Satnam Alag, NextBio Vice President of Engineering. "The applications also demonstrate NextBio's capabilities to search for relevant text not only at the document-level, but also at the sentence and paragraph level; to decompose an article into sub-sections; to find relevant content using faceted navigation; and to integrate content from Elsevier's Scopus product."

The three new applications are:

• Matching Sentences application:this application enables a user to quickly search for matching sentences or paragraphs, create a custom clipboard document with references to the articles and sentences, which can be then printed or emailed.
• Methods Search application:this application enables a user to search for documents that has all the search terms mentioned in the methods section of the document.
• Prolific authors:this application uses Elsevier's Scopus API to show the most prolific authors for a particular search term.

"Users typically print an article and then manually highlight relevant sentences/paragraphs. The matching sentences application streamlines this workflow by its powerful sentence/paragraph-level search and custom clipboard features. This application enables a user to very quickly go through a large number of search results, collecting relevant sentences/paragraphs on the way. The Matching Sentences application can save users hours of tedious work," said Dr. Yibu Chen, Bioinformatics Specialist, University of Southern California.

"The new applications are an important part of the collaboration between our two companies. They also show the power of the SciVerse platform, by which technology companies and commercial and academic developers can leverage the SciVerse APIs and our content to build new solutions to enhance search and discovery experience of our users," said Rafael Sidi, Elsevier Vice President of product management, ScienceDirect and knowledge discovery solutions.

"Our expertise in text-based search, ontology management, and semantic enrichment of content very nicely complements our unique data search and correlations engine. This is the first step in leveraging these capabilities within the NextBio platform," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. "These new applications focus on the user's workflow and help streamline the search process."

For more information about SciVerse please visit http://www.sciverse.com.

About NextBio

NextBio is the provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data. NextBio's platform seamlessly combines powerful tools with unique correlated content to transform information into knowledge, providing the foundation for new scientific discoveries. NextBio's unique 'correlation engine' pre-computes billions of significant connections among public and private data and enables researchers to intelligently mine it in real-time. NextBio helps organizations increase productivity and dramatically improve collaboration across therapeutic groups and geographic boundaries. NextBio is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution resulting in quick deployment and rapid return on investment.

Today, NextBio is used by researchers at the world's top commercial and academic institutions. NextBio's enterprise solution has been deployed at Burnham Institute for Medical Research, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Genzyme, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Regeneron, Scripps Research Institute, Stanford University, and UCB, among many others. To learn more about NextBio, please visit our website at http://www.nextbio.com.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

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May 25, 2010
NextBio Announces Spring 2010 Student Travel Grant Recipients

— Winning Essays Demonstrate NextBio's Ease of Use and Value as a Discovery Platform and Hub of Scientific Knowledge —

CUPERTINO, CA.—NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, announced the recipients of the Spring 2010 NextBio Student Travel Grants.

"Each of the winning entrants in this round of Graduate Student Travel Grants greatly impressed us with their account of the benefits provided by NextBio," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. "The winners clearly demonstrated that NextBio is, for them, an indispensible research platform that goes far beyond the ability to quickly query specific terms. Instead, NextBio enabled these young scientists to rapidly find unexpected correlations between their research and the work of others, as well as gain recommendations to relevant publications, survey knowledge on related topics, keep abreast of new scientific developments, and find sources of new hypotheses, as well as potential collaborators. We selected the winners' real world experiences as clear examples of the power of NextBio for quickly bringing vast amounts of scientific knowledge to users in a meaningful way."

The NextBio Travel Grant program helps graduate students participate in scientific conferences where they can contribute to the scientific community while discovering new ideas and finding collaborators. The first, second, and third place winners receive $1000, $500, and $250 respectively towards the costs of attending a scientific conference of their choice. This is one way NextBio is fulfilling its mission to support discovery and collaboration.

The three recipients of the Spring 2010 NextBio Travel Grant are:

• Kelly Bouchonville, Graduate Fellow in the Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology and Genetics program at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA
• Elena Piskounova, PhD Candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Bibhash Mukhopadhyay, PhD student at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA

To read the winning essays, find out more about the winners, and learn more about the NextBio Travel Grant program, please visit: http://www.nextbio.com/b/corp/grants.nb. The NextBio Student Travel Grant is an ongoing program and will award its next grants in Fall 2010.

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April 19, 2010
NextBio Capabilities Expanded to Enable Integration and Mining of Array and Next-Generation Sequencing Data

Sequence-Centric Module to NextBio Research Platform Launched at Bio-IT World

CUPERTINO, CA—NextBio today announced the latest evolution of its innovative life science research platform, adding new capabilities for the integration and mining of high-throughput array and next-generation sequencing data. The new NextBio Sequence-Centric module enables researchers to effectively explore and utilize massive amounts of public and internally generated sequencing data, while allowing organizations to create corporate-wide genomic data platforms to serve the needs of their global research teams.

"As the use of high-throughput sequencing technologies continues to grow, the resulting massive volumes of data are making effective data interpretation imperative," said Saeid Akhtari, President and Chief Executive Officer of NextBio. "The latest evolution of NextBio is designed to help research organizations intelligently consume public and internal genomic data from transcriptomic, copy-number, epigenetic and resequencing studies, and to use the knowledge gained to advance strategically important initiatives in basic and clinical research. The ability to integrate and correlate massive volumes of diverse data using a single platform provides our users unimaginable opportunities for generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and, ultimately, making major discoveries."

Correlated View of Large Quantities of Diverse Data

The unique technology developed by NextBio allows researchers in basic science, drug discovery and clinical research to obtain a correlated view of large quantities of processed public data in conjunction with their own datasets. Using NextBio, researchers can explore these diverse types of data within a single environment at unprecedented speed and scale, with just a few mouse clicks.

The highlights of NextBio Enterprise platform include:

• A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise solution enabling global research teams to capture and mine a consolidated collection of internal and public genomic data.
• Access to the largest repository of curated public array and Next-Gen sequencing data, enabling researchers to take advantage of public data side-by-side with their private, proprietary datasets.
• The ability to examine pathways, diseases, drugs or a researcher's own datasets within the context of public and internal large-scale studies.
• Integration, correlation and meta-analysis of Gene Expression, Proteomics, Epigenetics, Resequencing, CNV and GWAS data.
• Secure collaboration/sharing throughout the virtual research team.
• Platform for biomarker discovery and validation.
• The SaaS business model provides low-cost, facile deployment and support/updates, as well as secure hosting of data.

New Capabilities to be Launched at Bio-IT World

At Bio-IT World, NextBio co-founder and Vice President of Products, Ilya Kupershmidt will describe for the first time NextBio's unique method of harnessing the power in the voluminous amount of Next-Gen data. This presentation, "Integrative Biological Analysis of Public and Proprietary Microarray, GWAS and Next-Gen Sequencing Data" will be delivered at 12 noon ET as part of the Track 3 Session (Bioinformatics and Next-Gen Sequencing Data).

NextBio will also demonstrate its research platform, including the new capabilities for mining high throughput array and Next-Gen sequencing data, at the company's exhibition hall booth, #328. We invite you to witness for yourself the knowledge-generating power of NextBio.

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March 16, 2010
Dr. Russ Altman Joins NextBio's Scientific Advisory Board

CUPERTINO, CA—NextBio, developer of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced that Dr. Russ Altman of the Stanford University Medical School has joined the company's Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Altman is Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, and Medicine as well as Chair, Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University (and a Professor of Computer Science, by courtesy).

Dr. Altman is a recognized thought leader in pharmacogenomics, the study of how human genetic variation impacts drug response. Pharmacogenomics has been a key beneficiary of recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies. However, the data volumes produced by these technologies need effective management in order to maximize the success of pharmacogenomic research.

"We are honored that Dr. Altman has joined the NextBio team," stated NextBio co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Saeid Akhtari. "Pharmacogenomics is a key area for NextBio, and having Dr. Altman on board will enhance our efforts to develop the NextBio platform for pharmacogenomic applications."

"I am delighted to join NextBio's Scientific Advisory Board," stated Dr. Altman. "NextBio has developed a unique platform for integrating and mining global collections of large-scale biological data. I am excited to contribute to the development of their application in supporting scientists across basic and clinical research."

Dr. Altman's primary research focus is the application of computing technology to molecular biological problems in medicine. He is particularly interested in pharmacogenomics. His other work relates to the analysis of functional sites within macromolecules, and the application of algorithms for determining the structure, dynamics and function of biological macromolecules.

Dr. Altman holds an M.D. from Stanford Medical School, a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford, and an A.B. from Harvard College. He has been the recipient of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers as well as a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. He is a past President and founding Board Member of the International Society for Computational Biology, and an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. He leads one of seven NIH-supported National Centers for Biomedical Computation, focusing on physics-based simulation of biological structures. He won the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000 and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

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February 25, 2010
UCB Licenses NextBio Enterprise

CUPERTINO, CA—NextBio, developer of an innovative software platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced a license agreement with global biopharmaceutical company UCB, for NextBio Enterprise. NextBio Enterprise offers life sciences organizations unique tools for knowledge discovery and collaboration, seamless integration of internal and external research data, and secure data access.

"UCB is one of the leading biopharmaceutical companies, with operations in Europe, the United States and Asia," said Saeid Akhtari, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of NextBio. "We are very pleased that they are adopting the Enterprise version of the NextBio platform as an integral part of their research and development efforts. UCB's adoption of NextBio Enterprise will enable its scientists to gain unique insights from data created by diverse high-throughput technologies."

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February 2, 2010
NextBio Appoints Kevin G. Cronin Vice President of Sales

CUPERTINO, CA—NextBio, developer of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced the appointment of Kevin G. Cronin as Vice President of Sales. Mr. Cronin, most recently the Senior Vice President of Sales at Symyx Technologies, Inc., joins NextBio with over 20 years of experience selling discovery and development research tools, services, and intellectual property to pharmaceutical, agrochemical, consumer and chemical companies.

"Kevin Cronin will help take NextBio to the next stage of our development with his strong track record of selling enterprise-wide SaaS (software-as-a-service) platforms and fostering industry partnerships," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "At Symyx, he grew global revenue to tens of millions of dollars in a short amount of time. We are very pleased to welcome Kevin to the NextBio management team at the start of what we anticipate will be a very exciting year for our company."

"NextBio is an incredibly powerful research platform that enables life scientists to make discoveries and overcome research bottlenecks by helping them to better understand their own data and find new correlations with other experiments conducted worldwide," said Kevin Cronin. "With the enormous growth in life sciences data due to next-generation sequencing methods and other research technologies, the NextBio platform should prove an essential research tool for companies, universities and individual scientists alike."

At Symyx since 2001, Mr. Cronin was responsible for North American, European and APAC sales teams and the company's global distribution network. Prior to Symyx, he was employed in a series of increasingly responsible sales-related positions at MDL Information Systems, a division of Reed Elsevier, from 1987 to 2001. He began his career at Rainin Instrument in 1986. Mr. Cronin holds a B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of Washington and undertook graduate studies in organic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

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September 17, 2009
NextBio Secures $8 Million In Series C Venture Funding

CUPERTINO, CA—NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced that it has closed a $8 million Series C round of financing led by Newbury Ventures, a previous investor, and including participation from prominent private investors.

The capital will be used to fund the company's continued growth in sales reach and channels, international expansion, and technology leadership. Since its launch, NextBio's research platform has been adopted for use by researchers at many of the world's top commercial and academic institutions, and the company has recently partnered with leading life science publisher Elsevier to make the power of NextBio available to subscribers of ScienceDirect. This partnership delivers unique, intelligent and insightful scientific content enabling researchers to accelerate scientific discoveries.

"NextBio is a strong innovative organization, poised for continued growth," said Bruce Bauer, Senior Managing Director, at Newbury Ventures. "NextBio's combination of ground-breaking technology, an exceptional team, and its unique and compelling value proposition creates the opportunity for it to be a continued leader in the life sciences information technology space."

"We are delighted by this vote of confidence from both our existing and new investors and share their enthusiasm for the company's strategy and execution," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. "We are pleased to have these funds in place to finance the next phase of our growth."

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August 4, 2009
NextBio Announces Summer 2009 Student Travel Grant Recipients

— Winning Essays Demonstrate Breadth Of NextBio Content And Capabilities —

CUPERTINO, Calif.—NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced the recipients of the Summer 2009 NextBio Student Travel Grants. Each of the winners will receive $500 to support their travel to scientific conferences.

"We have had an excellent response to our travel grant program since its launch in January and the awarding of our inaugural grants in March 2009," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. "Each of the winners has clearly gained from their use of NextBio, not only to quickly answer specific research queries, but also to find and share information with potential collaborators and keep track of the latest trends and findings in their fields of interest. Their stories, which we are sharing on our website, are clear, real world illustrations of the power of the NextBio platform in its ability to bridge the gap between data and knowledge."

The NextBio Travel Grant program is designed to encourage and support graduate student attendance at conferences, where they are exposed to new ideas, research strategies and potential collaborators just as NextBio itself supports knowledge discovery and collaboration. The NextBio Travel Grant program is an ongoing program that will continue to award travel grants for graduate students quarterly. The deadline for the Fall 2009 NextBio Travel Grant is September 30th 2009.

The three recipients of the Summer 2009 NextBio Travel Grant are:

• Yunyun Jiang, graduate student in chemistry at Rice University, Houston Texas USA
• Sayan Mondal, Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology department at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York New York USA; and
• Abhishek Tiwari, graduate student in bioengineering biology at the University of Auckland, Auckland New Zealand

To read the winning essays, find out more about the winners, and learn more about the NextBio Travel Grant program, please visit: http://www.nextbio.com/b/corp/grants.nb

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June 12, 2009
Elsevier and NextBio Sign Partnership to Enrich ScienceDirect Content, Accelerating Life Sciences, Health Sciences and Chemistry Research

— Improving Research Discoverability and Productivity —

AMSTERDAM—Elsevier today announced a new partnership agreement with NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data to enrich ScienceDirect content. This agreement allows for an integration of NextBio's unique set of ontology-based semantic tools and a compilation of high quality sources of public data on ScienceDirect, providing health science, life science and chemistry researchers with a dynamic platform to improve discoverability and research productivity.

While most scientific information on genes, pathways, diseases, tissues and compounds is available online, it currently resides in various, disconnected, locations. Enhancing ScienceDirect with NextBio's biomedical ontology framework enables life sciences, health sciences and chemistry researchers to analyze ScienceDirect content and search ScienceDirect peer-reviewed literature together with publicly available research data from PubMed, clinical trials, experimental data, and news articles, on one single platform. The new enhancement will become available on ScienceDirect and accessible to subscribed users in summer 2009.

"ScienceDirect plays a crucial role in researchers' workflow," explained Rafael Sidi, Vice President, Product Management, ScienceDirect. "We continuously seek new ways to help accelerate science by increasing research productivity and efficiency. Partnering with NextBio will help further this mission by allowing us to provide intelligent and insightful information and smarter content to help researchers do research better."

"Researchers at Stanford Genome Technology Center use ScienceDirect to enhance and accelerate their life sciences research efforts," said Dr. Baback Gharizadeh, Research Scientist at Stanford University. "We are excited about ScienceDirect leveraging NextBio's technology to explore literature findings within the context of public experimental data and related basic and clinical research. Its unique content and the ability to test new hypotheses provide the next logical step in exploiting published studies."

"We are excited to be working with the world's largest science, technology and medical publisher," said Saeid Akhtari, Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, of NextBio. "Combining the depth of our search and discovery capabilities, and our unique content with the breath of the ScienceDirect platform will create new opportunities for Life Sciences, Health Sciences and Chemistry researchers to quickly gain access to the most current and comprehensive insight in their field."

About NextBio

NextBio is the provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data. NextBio's platform seamlessly combines powerful tools with unique correlated content to transform information into knowledge, providing the foundation for new scientific discoveries. NextBio helps organizations increase productivity and dramatically improve collaboration across therapeutic groups and geographic boundaries. NextBio is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution resulting in quick deployment and rapid return on investment.

Today, NextBio is used by over a million researchers at the world's top commercial and academic institutions. NextBio's enterprise solution has been deployed at Burnham Institute for Medical Research, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Genzyme, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Regeneron, Scripps Research Institute, and Stanford University, among many others. To learn more about NextBio, please visit http://www.nextbio.com.

About ScienceDirect

Over a quarter of the world's full text scientific, technical and medical (STM) peer-reviewed articles - managed by renowned editors, written by respected authors and read by researchers from around the globe - are available in one place: ScienceDirect.

Elsevier's extensive and unique full-text collection covers authoritative titles from the core scientific literature including high impact factor titles such as THE LANCET, Cell and Tetrahedron. Over nine million articles are available online, including Articles in Press which offer online access to recently accepted manuscripts. The critical mass of trusted information available on ScienceDirect is unsurpassed. Coverage includes over 2,500 journals published by Elsevier and dynamic linking to journals from approximately 2,000 STM publishers through CrossRef. An expanding program of online major reference works, handbooks, book series and over 4,400 eBooks in all fields of science seamlessly interlinks with primary research referenced in journal articles.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier's 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (/http://www.sciencedirect.com/), MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (/http://www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

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May 13, 2009
NextBio Appoints Jim Merryweather Vice President of Business Development

CUPERTINO, Calif.—NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced the appointment of Jim Merryweather, Ph.D., as Vice President of Business Development. Dr. Merryweather was most recently Vice President, Strategic Planning and Business Development at Applied Biosystems.

"We are very pleased to welcome Jim Merryweather to the NextBio executive team where he will lead the company's business development strategies and initiatives," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio's Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. "His extensive industry background and relationships will be extremely valuable as NextBio pursues new strategic relationships with complementary technology partners/providers, industry organizations and consortiums, academia, and commercial clients."

"NextBio has been building significant momentum over the past several years on a base of extremely satisfied customers," said Jim Merryweather, Vice President of Business Development, NextBio. "I am very excited to be on the team and I look forward to leading the company's business development initiatives, and in turn, driving growth within our markets."

At Applied Biosystems, Dr. Merryweather was responsible for developing and implementing the AB strategic planning and business development activities, partnering with and supporting the company's four divisions to facilitate their efforts for growth in their specific businesses. Prior to that, Dr. Merryweather was the Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing, and Executive Vice President of Pharmaceutical Corporate Development at Ciphergen Biosystems. Prior to Ciphergen, Dr. Merryweather held several positions at Incyte including Executive Vice President, Business Development & Commercial Operations; Executive Vice President, Business Development; and Senior Vice President, Client Business Management. Dr. Merryweather has also managed a variety of corporate functions at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Chiron, including Business Development, Corporate Development, Sales and Marketing, Research, Project Management, and Regulatory Affairs. Dr. Merryweather obtained his BS in Chemistry from Northern Illinois University and PhD in Biochemistry from Washington State University.

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April 28, 2009
NextBio Enhances its Life Sciences Discovery Platform with New Tools and Features, More Intuitive Interface

Users Provided with an Integrated and Comprehensive View Across Experimental Data and Literature

CUPERTINO, Calif.—NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today released an enhanced version of the company's knowledge discovery platform and products. The NextBio platform is designed to accelerate scientific discoveries and meet the research needs of individual scientists as well as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and research institutions seeking to apply NextBio's capabilities on an enterprise-wide basis.

"We've responded to our users' feedback with a number of enhancements to NextBio, including a new more intuitive user interface, new knowledge discovery and presentation capabilities, and improved community and personalization features," said Ilya Kupershmidt, NextBio Vice President of Products. "Together, these upgrades to the NextBio platform deliver new levels of ease in searching the vast amounts of public and proprietary data, making new discoveries, and sharing that knowledge with one's collaborators and peers."

He noted that included in the new release of NextBio is a novel "recommendation" engine that leverages NextBio's unique ontologies to recommend studies, literature, clinical trials, and news items to the researcher based on their interests.

"Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have leveraged NextBio to support and enhance our biomedical research efforts," said Dr. Jeanne Loring, Professor of Developmental Neurobiology and Director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine. "We are very excited about the new NextBio release, which promises to provide more functionality and improve internal and external knowledge sharing."

NextBio is now offered in three product versions, each leveraging the NextBio Platform and designed to meet the specific needs of individual scientists or research groups:

• NextBio Basic — a free, publicly available web application that allows the researcher to explore the power of NextBio. NextBio Basic provides access to a curated, correlated database of public data, as well as integrated literature, published clinical trials data, scientific news, and community features.
• NextBio Professional — designed for the individual researcher or groups of researchers to effectively exploit publicly available and internally generated experimental data to enable and accelerate new scientific discoveries. NextBio Professional lets researchers make real-time discoveries of correlations between genes, pathways, diseases and compounds from a curated repository of experimental data, clinical trials data and literature.
• NextBio Enterprise — a completely integrated enterprise version designed for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, commercial and non-profit R&D organizations, and academic institutions. NextBio Enterprise combines the features available in NextBio Professional with state-of-the-art security and data protection and an extensive set of APIs, allowing seamless integration into other research systems, workflows and processes.

The NextBio Platform is a robust, fault tolerant, secure and configurable infrastructure that is designed to support an individual researcher or an organization with tens of thousands of employees in locations around the world. The NextBio Platform provides a unique ontology-based semantic framework that connects highly heterogeneous data and textual information.

"The pace of life sciences research is accelerating, with enormous amounts of data being generated each year," commented Mr. Kupershmidt. "Whether you are an individual scientist or a member of a major company or institution's R&D efforts, NextBio's research platform, unique content and products provide an unparalleled way to quickly transform data into new scientific knowledge."

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April 27, 2009
NextBio Announces Licensing Agreement with Merck & Co., Inc.

CUPERTINO, Calif.—NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced a licensing agreement with Merck & Co., Inc. NextBio offers the life sciences enterprise secure data access, knowledge discovery and collaboration tools, and enterprise integration capabilities for seamless correlation of internal research data.

"We are pleased Merck has chosen NextBio as a drug discovery and development partner," said Saeid Akhtari, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of NextBio. "Merck's adoption of the NextBio solution validates our unique approach to solving the information bottleneck currently impacting research-driven pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worldwide. We look forward to further building and extending our relationship with Merck's researchers over the coming years."

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April 14, 2009
NextBio Receives Phase II SBIR Grant to Add New Genomic and Proteomic Content

CUPERTINO, Calif.—NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced the receipt of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant will provide approximately $1,000,000 over two years to support the incorporation of genomic and proteomic information from additional vertebrate organisms into NextBio. It will also help fund NextBio's development of infrastructure to support plant research by incorporating Arabidopsis, corn, rice and soy plant genomics into its cross-species knowledge discovery framework.

"Life science researchers use critical biological information from studies of diverse species to make key correlations that help them discover new knowledge about human or plant physiology and disease," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "With this support from NIH, we will extend the NextBio offering enabling researchers to leverage a wider range of data from model organisms to better understand biology."

As part of this effort, NextBio will develop ontologies, translational methodology and cross-study comparison logic to connect findings across different organisms. Furthermore, the company will develop advanced statistical and visualization methods to help correlate and interpret the data. The new species information will build upon a wealth of information already supported within NextBio from human, mouse, rat, fly, worm and yeast systems.

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April 7, 2009
NextBio Announces First Three Recipients of Student Travel Grants

— Winning Essays Convey How NextBio Helped Them Find Correlations, Make Discoveries Between their Research and Published Data —

CUPERTINO, Calif.—NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, today announced the inaugural recipients of the company's NextBio Travel Grant. Each of the winners will receive $500 to support their travel to scientific conferences. The NextBio Travel Grant program was designed to encourage and support graduate student attendance at conferences, where they are exposed to new ideas, research strategies and potential collaborators just as NextBio itself supports knowledge discovery and collaboration.

"We are very pleased to make the first three awards in this ongoing grant program," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "Our judges were very impressed with the quality of the entries and how clearly they articulated the value that NextBio delivers in its ability to rapidly uncover knowledge buried in the enormous wealth of publicly available and proprietary data."

The first three NextBio Travel Grant recipients are:

• Bryan Dickinson, graduate student in chemistry at the University of California Berkeley, Berkeley California USA
• Laura Mariani, graduate student in neuroscience at Emory University, Atlanta Georgia USA; and
• Khader Shameer, senior research fellow in computational biology at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore India

To read the winning essays, find out more about the winners, and learn more about the NextBio Travel Grant program, please visit: http://www.nextbio.com/b/corp/grants.nb

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February 24, 2009
Novel Search Strategies to be Presented by NextBio at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference

— Best Practices for Maximizing Life Science Research Productivity Will be Offered at San Francisco Meeting —

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Life science research organizations can maximize the productivity and return on investment (ROI) of their research through the use of new search strategies capable of correlating internal research findings with data from the world's publicly available large-scale studies, says Ilya Kupershmidt, co-founder of NextBio, provider of the leading life sciences search engine. On February 27, 2009, at the upcoming Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco, California, Mr. Kupershmidt, Vice President of Products at NextBio, will present best practices related to accessing, understanding and finding new discoveries within the world's publicly available life sciences data and literature.

"New search solutions like NextBio enable scientists to quickly search and find correlations between their own work and the vast amount of research data that has been created and published worldwide. Leveraging this knowledge empowers organizations to make important discoveries more quickly than ever before, greatly increasing the productivity of their research efforts and opening new doors to global collaboration and knowledge sharing," said Mr. Kupershmidt.

Mr. Kupershmidt's presentation will take place on February 27 at 10:05 am PST at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference, which is being held from February 25-27 at San Francisco's Moscone North Convention Center.

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January 13, 2009
NextBio Appoints Sergio Gurrieri as Senior Director of Business Development

CUPERTINO, Calif.—NextBio, provider of the leading life sciences search engine, today announced the appointment of Sergio Gurrieri, Ph.D., as Senior Director of Business Development. In this role, Dr. Gurrieri will be responsible for identifying new growth opportunities and strategic business development initiatives.

Dr. Gurrieri joins NextBio with 20 years of experience in life sciences research, marketing and business development. Dr. Gurrieri has extensive expertise in the identification, establishment and management of partnerships, sponsorships, and licensing opportunities. Prior to joining NextBio, he served as Group Marketing Manager at Millipore Corporation, where he led the development and execution of Millipore's global eBusiness strategies covering a portfolio of 25,000 products.

Prior to Millipore, Dr. Gurrieri held a number of research and development, business development and marketing roles at Invitrogen and BD Biosciences Clontech. Dr. Gurrieri has authored 26 research articles and reviews in top-rated international scientific journals. Dr. Gurrieri holds an MBA in Management and Marketing from San Diego State University, and an MS and PhD in Biophysical Chemistry from the University of Oregon.

"I am very pleased to welcome Sergio to NextBio," said Saeid Akhtari, Chief Executive Officer of NextBio. "Sergio's rich experience in driving strategic development initiatives for life science companies is an ideal fit for NextBio as we continue to identify and capitalize on the tremendous market opportunities available to us. We are confident Sergio's leadership will enrich our ability to deliver increasing value to our customers and partners."

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