ORIDIS Biomed Raises Further Human Capital: Bioinformatics Expert Joins Senior Management

(2005-06-09)

GRAZ, Austria June 9: ORIDIS Biomed (Austria) announced today that Georg Casari has joined the company as the Chief Information Officer. Dr. Casari's extensive expertise in bioinformatics and biotechnology is a valuable asset to the company, which is regarded as Austria's leading enterprise providing targeted treatment solutions for liver cancer and metabolic liver diseases.

Dr. Georg Casari has joined ORIDIS Biomed as Chief Information Officer (CIO) to further optimise the company's data integration and information management. The establishment of the position of Chief Information Officer at the senior management level reflects ORIDIS' strategy to give top priority to the effective management of biological and medical information. This will further strengthen ORIDIS’ strategy to plot the shortest path from disease to treatment as developed in ORIDIS' internal drug discovery programmes for liver diseases.

Peter Hecht, CEO of ORIDIS Biomed explains: "Our vision to provide targeted treatment solutions for individualised medical care requires the analysis of information from a wide range of sources during the development of medicines. At ORIDIS, we consistently integrate molecular biology, patients molecular pathology and in vivo models with clinical facts to drive our drug development projects. Therefore, we regard it as an important step for the company to have recruited Georg Casari, a renowned expert in bioinformatics in biotechnology with an established track record." Georg Casari previously held management positions as the Vice President Informatics at Cellzome (Germany) and the Senior Vice President of Life Science Informatics Research at LION Bioscience (Germany, UK), a company he also co-founded. Prior to that, he was a staff scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, Germany) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI, UK).

For Georg Casari, the new career move comes with great opportunities: "ORIDIS offers a unique combination of biologically relevant disease tissue coupled with its medical information. With this, the company is internationally at the cutting-edge of the new concept of tissomics. This new approach allows ORIDIS to develop therapeutically relevant medicines and diagnostics tailored to the patient needs I am excited about giving my expert input into the development of targeted medicines and seeing information technology directly contribute to the patient benefit."

About ORIDIS Biomed
ORIDIS Biomed is Austria's leading company for target treatment solutions with a focus on treatments for liver cancer and metabolic liver diseases. The company has access to 3 million tissue samples and the relevant medical records of one of the biggest and furthest developed BioBanks worldwide. Since its foundation in 2001, the company has successfully established and optimised its proprietary technology of well-defined tissue microarrays (TMAs). By exploiting the potential of the TMAs, ORIDIS has already discovered over 50 targets for liver disease and is now in the process of developing and optimising its promising lead compounds for drug development. Furthermore, industrial customers of ORIDIS such as MorphoSys, Boehringer Ingelheim and Baxter will benefit from this platform by a reduction in attrition rates in discovery and clinical development, and by an increase in their productivity and speed of pharmaceutical research.


Contact:
ORIDIS Biomed
Dr. Reinhold Bayer
Stiftingtalstrasse 3-5
8010 Graz, Austria
Tel: +43 / 316 / 325776 - 10
Fax: +43 / 316 / 325776 - 22
E-mail: bayer@oridis-biomed.com

Issued by:
PR&D - Public Relations for Research & Development
Campus Vienna Biocenter 2
1030 Vienna, Austria
Tel: +43 / 1 / 505 70 44
E-mail: contact@prd.at



For more information, please contact:
Till C. Jelitto
PR&D
Campus Vienna Biocenter 3
Vienna
Vienna
1030
Austria

Telephone: +43/1/505 70 44
Fax: +43/1/505 50 83
Web: www.prd.at