IO INFORMATICS ANNOUNCES PARTICIPATION IN MICROSOFT’S
BIO-IT ALLIANCE AND JOINT BIOMARKER PROJECT

EMERYVILLE, CA and Seattle, WA October 19, 2006 —-- IO Informatics, Inc. is pleased to announce its membership in Microsoft’s BioIT Alliance and its participation in the Alliance’s first joint biomarker project. The alliance brings pharmaceutical, biotechnology, hardware and software industries together to improve integration and sharing of complex biomedical data required to improve drug discovery and development and make personalized medicine a reality.

"I am thrilled to welcome IO Informatics to the BioIT Alliance,” said Donald Rule, Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Advisor for Bioinformatics. “IO Informatics leverages Microsoft technologies and offers elegant solutions to difficult integration problems faced by many of industry leaders that I’ve spoken with. IO Informatics software will provide significant value to our first joint application for biomarker discovery and validation.”

IO Informatics’ Sentient Suite of software products facilitates collaboration among multidisciplinary researchers by providing a system for data integration that allows users to search, view, annotate, link and share data without middleware, programming or computer science expertise. These capabilities solve challenges to data sharing and integration so that users can focus on the insights gained from information in context.

Membership in the BioIT Alliance has enabled IO Informatics to share best practices and standards for integrating, annotating and sharing data, and for applying that data to specific life sciences applications. Since joining in August, IO Informatics has met with alliance members and customers and identified biomarker detection and validation as one of several critical issues that it can contribute to, in order to improve the bottom line in life sciences instrumentation, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology industries.

“We’re truly pleased to be a part of the BioIT Alliance,” said Patricia Rougeau, President & CEO of IO Informatics. “Our participation has already resulted in useful relationships. We anticipate doing great things with Microsoft and our partners in the Alliance and see clear value for our customers from our participation in the collaborative biomarker project.”

For more information about the Bio-IT Alliance, please visit the Alliance website at http://bioitalliance.org/

About IO Informatics
IO Informatics (www.io-informatics.com) is revolutionizing software methods by developing intelligent agents that enable a multidimensional approach to data integration. Through the proprietary IMO (intelligent multidimensional object) and Sentient, an interactive software environment, IO Informatics enables medical, pharmaceutical, and other life science researchers to structure and define data relationships, view these relationships, query them, and capitalize on them — all within a secure, compliant, auditable framework that helps organizations accumulate and capitalize on research knowledge. IO Informatics is located in Emeryville, California.

About Micorsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. .

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