Press Release

3rd Millennium Implements Bioinformatics System for Ardais Corporation

CAMBRIDGE, MA - December 4, 2001 -- 3rd Millennium, a leading bioinformatics consultancy based in Cambridge, MA, announced today the completion of a custom bioinformatics system for Ardais Corporation. The engagement involved the design and development of a laboratory information management system (LIMS) to support the unique needs of Ardais’ high throughput pathology lab operations.

The proprietary system developed by 3rd Millennium provides the full suite of standard LIMS functionality along with capabilities to support the specific integration, workflow, and analysis needs of Ardais’ researchers and biopharmaceutical collaborators. "The system is central to our BIGR™ Library, through which we provide biomedical researchers with research-quality clinical materials, accompanied by in-depth medical, pathology, treatment history and outcomes data, along with proprietary bioinformatics tools to design their experiments," said Martin L. Ferguson Ph. D., Ardais' vice president of Bioinformatics. "3rd Millennium did a great job of designing a system to handle the complexity of integrating clinical and bioinformatics information in our high-throughput laboratory setting – a task that has rarely if ever been done in the world of drug discovery. Because they work exclusively in this domain, they were able to understand quickly what we needed the system to do and they developed it on an aggressive schedule."

"Ardais is a tremendously exciting company whose technology, services and capabilities will add significantly to biomedical research,” said Richard Dweck, president of 3rd Millennium. “In this case, by deploying a team with considerable medical, biological, and systems development expertise while leveraging our experience and tools, we were able to implement a system that should add considerable value to Ardais’ business. Our team really enjoyed working with Ardais. It was a project that enabled us to work with a rapidly-growing company and draw on the recent work we did on a number of other systems we developed."

About Ardais Corporation
Ardais Corporation is a privately held clinical genomics company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts. Ardais enhances and accelerates drug discovery by systematically introducing actual human disease into the discovery research process on a large scale. Ardais BIGRTM Library is a shared, centralized repository – encompassing tens of thousands of tissue samples, molecular derivatives and associated clinical information – that enables researchers to conduct large-scale molecular analyses of actual human disease, in order to identify and validate clinically relevant biological targets for potential pharmaceutical intervention and diagnostic development. Ardais applies its human disease-based technology platform, integrated expertise and tissue collection infrastructure to advance the clinical discovery programs of its biopharmaceutical partners. For further information, visit the Company’s website at www.ardais.com.

About 3rd Millennium, Inc.
3rd Millennium, Inc., located in Cambridge, MA is a leading bioinformatics consultancy that works with pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic clients on a project basis to design and develop software systems critical to early stage biological research and discovery. 3rd Millennium's expertise is in custom biological database applications, microarray informatics and analytics, and data and analysis integration. The company has extensive experience developing systems for laboratory information management, microarray-based gene expression profiling, gene analysis and annotation, genomic and proteomic data integration and versioning, and biological pathway modeling. Additional information can be found at www.3rdmill.com.