PHILADELPHIA, PA, August 10, 2005 - Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (AMEX: BIO; BIOb) announced today the release of KnowItAll® Informatics System version 6.0, a major upgrade to the industry's leading software and database solutions for spectroscopy, cheminformatics, ADME/Tox prediction, and lead optimization.

Highlights in this release include:

The New KnowItAll Enterprise Server offers companies the ability to centralize their analytical, biological, and chemical data resources onto a secure server and to assign read/write ability to access those resources throughout the organization.

A new command line interface feature enables software outside of the KnowItAll environment to interface directly with KnowItAll for transfer of data and execution of KnowItAll functions, thus bypassing the conventional KnowItAll mouse/keyboard user interface. For example, with the command line interface, organizations can integrate KnowItAll's ADME/Tox batch processing prediction tools into a customer's internal systems for improved workflow.

A new edition of the KnowItAll system, the KnowItAll MedChem Edition, that is specifically designed for medicinal chemists and offers an integrated informatics environment for optimizing lead compounds and managing analytical chemistry information for medicinal chemists.

The new OptimizeIt™ application that suggests modifications of lead compounds for medicinal chemists by enumerating and analyzing combinatorial libraries based on the parent compound or scaffold within certain user-defined in silico ADME/Tox or physicochemical properties and pharmacological activity constraints. The result is an optimized library with optimized chemical structures having both desirable ADME/Tox and the desired pharmacological profiles.

The addition of new experimental ADME/Tox databases that contain measured ADME/Tox properties for blood-brain barrier permeability, cardiac toxicity, and chemical carcinogens to Bio-Rad's experimental ADME/Tox databases collection. These databases are of interest to those involved in drug discovery for benchmarking the results of their experiments, validating the accuracy of existing ADME/Tox models, and building new predictive models using these database as part of a training set.

The ADME/Tox Edition of the KnowItAll Informatics System offers a new feature to allow confidence levels to be displayed for in silico ADME/Tox predictions for those predictive models capable of supporting this information.

On the spectral informatics development front, Bio-Rad offers four new high-quality NMR spectral databases from Japan's prestigious National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and NMRDBTech in its HaveItAll® NMR spectral collection. With the addition of these databases, Bio-Rad's HaveItAll NMR collection now offers access to over 360,000 13C and 30,000 1H NMR spectra.
Gregory M. Banik, Ph.D., General Manager of Bio-Rad's Informatics Division commented, "The new work flow applications that we have introduced offer a great leap forward in productivity for our pharmaceutical and analytical chemistry customers. We are pleased to have been able to introduce these powerful new advances in our software and databases to the market so quickly, which is a testament not only to our agile software development philosophy but also to our exceptional product marketing and development teams."

Bio-Rad's KnowItAll Informatics System offers fully integrated software and database solutions for ADME/Tox, Lead Optimization, Spectroscopy, and Cheminformatics with tools for database building, management, search, analysis, prediction, reporting, and databases, all within a single user interface. 

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About Bio-Rad

Bio-Rad's Informatics Division (www.informatics.bio-rad.com) specializes in state-of-the-art software and database solutions for the pharmaceutical, biotech, and chemical industries. Bio-Rad is the leading publisher of fully verified spectral databases, cheminformatics, spectroscopy software, and decision support systems for drug discovery. The company's award-winning KnowItAll Informatics System offers a fully integrated environment with flexible, expandable software and database solutions for spectroscopy (MS, NMR, IR, Raman, spectral data management), cheminformatics, in silico ADME/Tox prediction, and lead optimization.

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (www.bio-rad.com) is a multinational manufacturer and distributor of life science research, clinical diagnostics and informatics products. It is based in Hercules, California, and serves more than 70,000 research and industry customers worldwide through a network of more than 30 wholly owned subsidiary offices.

Various statements made within this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" for purposes of the Securities and Exchange Commission's "safe harbor" provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Rule 3b-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements contained herein involve risks and uncertainties that could cause results to differ materially from the Company's expectations.

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Contact Information

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Informatics Division
3316 Spring Garden Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Phone: +1 215 382 7800
www.knowitall.com

For more information on this press release:
Name: Deborah Kernan
Phone: +1 215 349 7366
E-mail: deborah_kernan@bio-rad.com