(San Francisco) –Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld's inaugural Life Sciences Day on December 4, Lawrence J. Ellison, chairman and CEO of Oracle Corporation, extolled the life sciences industry for engineering quantum leaps in scientific knowledge and drug therapy, and reaffirmed Oracle's long-standing commitment to facilitate the valuable research and discovery efforts of biosciences, genomic and pharmaceutical companies.

Working with leaders in the life sciences field for more than a decade, Oracle has developed an integrated, end-to-end information-management solution to meet needs of this rapidly growing industry. With more than 65 per cent of life sciences companies running Oracle technology -- including Fortune 500's top 10 pharmaceutical/biotech companies -- Oracle is uniquely positioned to support the massively data-intensive lifecycles of new products, and enable these companies to run their businesses more efficiently and cost-effectively.

On Life Sciences Day at Oracle’s OpenWorld, Simmons and such industry leaders as Dr. J. Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics; J. Guy Kraines, vice president, corporate IT, Genentech, Inc.; Brian Atwood, managing director, Versant Ventures; and William Blake, vice president, high-performance technical computing, at Compaq Computer, discussed the technology challenges at each critical phase of product development -- discovery, development, manufacturing, sales and marketing, and regulatory compliance -- and how Oracle solutions help meet them. Oracle's Pharmaceutical Applications enable companies reduce product time-to-market and clinical development costs. Oracle Process Manufacturing provides life sciences companies with a strategic, secure, Internet-based, supply-chain management solution, including integrated recipe management, cost management, logistics, inventory management, regulatory compliance and quality management. Oracle Grants helps companies manage funding, and Oracle Clinical helps companies track preclinical and clinical stages of product development.

Oracle also has a philanthropic interest in biotechnology: in 1999, it donated more than $800,000 in software and technical support services to the bioinformatics program at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. The gift has been used to restructure the human genome database (GBD), a foremost source of information on human genes.