SAN RAMON, California—December 20, 2006—Elsevier MDL has released the MDL® Direct 6.0 chemistry data cartridge enabling researchers to register, search and retrieve structures and reactions stored in large databases entirely in the Oracle® relational environment. Already used by more than 80 percent of life sciences organizations, the MDL Direct data cartridge is the database component of the MDL® Isentris® 2.0 system, which sets a new standard in information access and the integration of content and workflow. With this latest release, Elsevier MDL also extends support to the Linux platform, thereby expanding the availability of MDL Direct data cartridge technology to a growing community of scientific researchers.

"MDL Direct 6.0 offers industry-leading chemistry capabilities and reaction searching performance, in addition to comprehensive integration with a full suite of workflow applications from a proven provider of cheminformatics solutions," said Dr. Trevor Heritage, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Elsevier MDL. "By providing a pure cartridge architecture that can be used in any data model and accessed from any SQL (Structured Query Language)-compliant application, MDL Direct offers both flexibility and solid functionality for handling chemical information in a modern, integrated database environment."

MDL Direct technology incorporates Elsevier MDL’s premier chemistry searching capabilities including Rgroup, Sgroup, flexmatch, 2-D and 3-D exact and molecule/reaction substructure searching; structure similarity, super-similarity and sub-similarity searching; reaction similarity searching; comprehensive registration; and searching of tetrahedral stereoisomers and non-tetrahedral stereoisomers.

New, improved indexing provides an impressive improvement in performance for scientists searching large reaction databases. MDL Direct is the only chemistry search engine that combines full reaction transformation searching, unsurpassed chemistry sophistication and proven performance on databases with over five million reactions and at least 20 million structures.

As the database tier of the MDL® Isentris® system, MDL Direct accelerates structure and reaction searching for the Isentris system and for related applications including MDL® Registration (for building compound registries) and MDL® Notebook (for managing laboratory workflows and data entry in an e-R&D environment).

To protect customer investments in legacy systems and ensure a smooth transition to the new technology, straightforward conversion tools will simplify upgrading to MDL Direct 6.0. Existing MDL ISIS customers or those with the previous version of MDL Direct will migrate to the new environment at their own pace in a step-wise, straightforward manner.

For more information about this powerful relational database tool for chemical structure and reaction searching, visit www.mdl.com

Elsevier MDL provide informatics, database and workflow solutions that accelerate successful life sciences R&D by improving the speed and quality of scientists' decision making. Researchers around the world depend on Elsevier MDL for innovative and reliable discovery informatics software solutions and services augmented by 400 Elsevier chemistry and life sciences journals and related products. For more information, visit www.mdl.com. Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. For more information, visit www.elsevier.com.

Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange). For more information, visit www.reedelsevier.com.