CONTACT: Corbin Collins MDL Information Systems, Inc. (510) 895-1313, ext. 1371 corbin@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@mdli.com chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. 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