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Symyx Technologies Honored With the Frost & Sullivan Technology Leadership Award for Its R&D Enabling Technologies

Posted on: Tuesday, 19 July 2005, 09:01 CDT

Symyx Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq:SMMX) will be presented Frost & Sullivan's 2005 Technology Leadership Award at tonight's Excellence in Emerging Technologies Awards Banquet for developing enabling technologies and methods including research, instrumentation, and software to aid better, faster and more efficient R&D programs.

Each year, this Award is given to a company that has created and advanced enabling technologies for R&D -- a technology that has either impacted, or has the potential to impact, several market sectors. The company's successful technology development has significantly contributed to R&D organizations in terms of adoption, change, and competitive posture. The Award also recognizes the company's leadership in the successful promotion of these technologies and its continuing impact in technology commercialization.

"Symyx's high-throughput (HT) approaches offer significant advantages over conventional methods of catalyst discovery," says Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Anil Naidu. "Symyx's systems can rapidly screen materials to achieve the desired properties, thus delivering results faster and at a much lower cost."

An HT screen can quickly distinguish between active and inactive systems and help evaluate a much broader range of catalyst chemicals and conditions. Consequently, the R&D efforts can focus on maximizing the potential of the most promising candidates instead of optimizing catalyst structures around less efficient ones.

HT techniques can also generate required quantities of useful catalyst performance data to help researchers forecast structure-property relationships.

Symyx's HT technology consists of integrated workflows that comprise various instrumentation, software, and methods. They enable researchers to conduct faster material synthesis, testing, and data analysis.

To become the success that it is now, the company had to face challenges. One of these was to find a way to test catalysts efficiently.

While using HT technology, it was possible to obtain 1,000 different catalysts daily, but without a suitable mechanism to test them for conversion rate, specificity, and selectivity, problems of bottlenecking was a possibility. Symyx countered this by developing proprietary instrumentation and software.

Another challenge was to ensure validity of results obtained by conducting tests with materials at micro scale quantity on a two-dimensional surface. Symyx solved this issue by conducting considerable experiments in the early stages of data analysis to prove that in case of a scale up, the data can be readily replicated.

Symyx also had to establish its credibility as a research service provider. While outsourced research was prevalent in the pharmaceutical sector, it was rare in the chemicals sector. Symyx overcame the skepticism about its business model and technologies by its strong record of quality and consistency and developed partnerships with chemical, energy and pharmaceutical industry leaders.

"Symyx's HT screening technique has found other applications apart from being used to discover materials and catalysts," notes Naidu. "It is now proving extremely useful to pharmaceutical companies not only in drug discovery but also for testing drugs for attributes such as crystallinity and salts."

Held in Boston, Frost & Sullivan's Excellence in Emerging Technologies Awards Banquet honors world-class companies for pioneering the development and introduction of innovative technologies into their markets. An annual event, the banquet recognizes the overall technical excellence of a company and its commitment towards technology innovation.

About Symyx Technologies Inc.

Symyx(R) Technologies (Nasdaq:SMMX) develops and applies high-throughput research methods, instrumentation and software to enable accelerated discovery of proprietary materials and processes in the chemical, energy, pharmaceutical, electronics, consumer goods, and automotive industries. Symyx offers these proprietary technologies to customers seeking to transform their research productivity through research collaborations, Discovery Tools sales, and the license of materials, intellectual property, and software. Information about Symyx, including reports and other information filed by Symyx with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is available at http://www.symyx.com.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services, and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit http://www.frost.com.

Source: Business Wire

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