Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Announces Appointment of Chief Patent Counsel

ROCKVILLE, Md.--(BW HealthWire)--January 3, 2001--Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is pleased to announce the appointment of Mary E. Gormley, M.S., J.D. as Chief Patent Counsel for the Company.

Ms. Gormley will be directing all company-wide intellectual property issues, including coordinating the Company's current activities with Brobeck, Phleger, & Harrison LLP in Washington, D.C., Shanks & Herbert LLP in Alexandria, Virginia, and Ropes & Gray in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ms. Gormley spent the last seven years as Senior Patent Counsel for Akzo Nobel (NASDAQ: AKZOY), an international company that serves customers throughout the world with pharmaceuticals, coatings, and chemicals.

At Akzo, Ms. Gormley was responsible for preparing and prosecuting domestic and foreign-based patents for several of Akzo's pharmaceutical business units, including Organon (pharmaceuticals), Intervet (veterinary vaccines and diagnostics), Organon Teknika (immunodiagnostics) and Advanced BioScience Laboratories (amplification and diagnostics).

She also participated in patent strategy development, the appeals and interference practice, third party infringement and freedom-to-use issues, and negotiating and preparing various intellectual property contracts.

Prior to that, Ms. Gormley held the position of Associate Patent Attorney for Armstrong, Westerman, et al LLP and Oliff and Berridge PLC, two Washington D.C. area law firms. She also served as a Patent Examiner for the United States Patent and Trademark Office, where she examined biotechnology-based patent applications.

Ms. Gormley spent six years as a researcher, mainly at the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health. She studied mitochondrial genetics as well as protein polymorphisms as markers of central nervous system diseases through the use of state-of-the-art proteomic techniques, with an emphasis on aging in humans.

Ms. Gormley received a B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Maryland, received a M.S. in Genetics and passed Ph.D. comprehensives from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and received her J.D. from the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

The Company is currently preparing several patent applications for discoveries resulting from in-house research and development efforts. "We welcome this timely addition of Mary to Panacea's management team," stated Kasra Ghanbari, Chief Operating Officer of the Company. "Her broad range of experience and expertise are well suited to effectively manage the Company's growing intellectual property portfolio."

Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. focuses on developing and utilizing protein-based technologies to detect and identify changes associated with and involved in diseases of the central nervous system and cancer such as Alzheimer's disease, brain tumors, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, and Lewy body diseases such as Parkinson's disease.

Changes in disease-relevant proteins by altered expression, post-translational modification, and functional variation are utilized to develop diagnostic tests and therapeutic agents.