SAN DIEGO, CA - (March 16, 1999) Privately-held Structural Bioinformatics Inc. (SBI) today announced the attainment of a milestone in its research collaboration with Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. to discover new anti-inflammatory therapeutics for an undisclosed protein target. The research milestone triggered a payment to Structural Bioinformatics of an undisclosed amount.

To achieve this milestone, Structural Bioinformatics used its proprietary protein modeling and DynaPharm™ technologies to find small molecule leads starting from the gene sequence of the protein target.

"SBI has delivered on its promise to provide structure-based small molecule lead compounds from gene sequence information," said Dr. Toshinari Tamura, Director of the Board and Director of the Institute for Drug Discovery Research of Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co. "We demanded quite stringent binding affinity and specificity requirements to meet this milestone. SBI provided us with a number of lead molecules for our target, all from a short list of computationally selected compounds in a short period of time."

"We are pleased with the results generated for this collaboration," said Dr. Edward T. Maggio, Chairman, President and CEO of Structural Bioinformatics. "This accomplishment builds on our recent milestone announcement in October of 1998 regarding the development of novel viral protease inhibitors from gene sequence information for another collaborator, as well as the two recent announcements for our own successful in-house lead finding projects for the TNF and EPO receptors."

Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. is the third-largest pharmaceutical company in Japan. Headquartered in Tokyo and established in 1923, Yamanouchi is expanding its business base to Europe, the United States and Asia and employs nearly 8,000 people worldwide. As a research-based developer, manufacturer and marketer, Yamanouchi has introduced several world-class drugs to the international market, including the H2 antagonist famotidine, the calcium antagonist nicardipine, and tamsulosin, a treatment for functional symptoms of benign prostatic hyperplasia.

Structural Bioinformatics Inc. accelerates lead discovery by closing the gap from gene sequence to lead discovery and is a world leader in computer-based protein analysis. The Company has developed advanced algorithms that are used to calculate the dynamic 3-D structure of proteins from DNA sequence information. In turn, the 3-D information is used to design and select small molecules from various chemical subclasses that will act as inhibitors or antagonists to the protein. SBI enables pharmaceutical companies to make sense of the enormous amount of genetic data emerging from sequencing of the human genome and to translate the data into structural information and, eventually, drug candidates.