SAN DIEGO, CA - (May 17, 1999) - DuPont Pharmaceuticals Company, a component of DuPont's Life Science Enterprise (NYSE:DD), and privately-held Structural Bioinformatics Inc. (SBI) today announced a strategic alliance for the discovery and development of small-molecule leads in a family of signaling proteins and other targets. The alliance is a multiyear agreement involving certain guaranteed and milestone payments with an overall value in excess of $100 million assuming several successful products.

Under the terms of the multiyear agreement, DuPont Pharmaceuticals will pay for technology access and for research support at SBI. DuPont Pharmaceuticals and SBI will work in close collaboration to identify and optimize lead molecules targeted at receptors for several signaling proteins. SBI will use its proprietary protein modeling and virtual screening and lead discovery technologies to identify and optimize potential lead candidates. DuPont Pharmaceuticals and SBI will work in parallel to provide chemistry, molecular biology, pharmacology and computational chemistry expertise. DuPont Pharmaceuticals will assume responsibility for preclinical discovery and development of leads arising from the collaboration as well as for small-molecule leads previously identified by SBI. DuPont Pharmaceuticals will receive worldwide rights to all discovery products arising from the research program. SBI will receive preclinical and clinical milestone payments and royalties from any drugs commercialized from these activities.

"SBI's approach is a cutting-edge attempt to address the challenging problem of interrupting protein-protein interactions. We are looking forward to working together in this collaboration," said Paul Friedman, M.D., President of DuPont Pharmaceuticals Research Laboratories.

"The availability of accurate and dynamically-validated protein structural information is increasingly an important factor in rapidly developing a best-in-class clinical candidate. SBI effectively utilizes the 3-D protein structure information encoded in expressed gene sequences to identify small-molecule inhibitors or antagonists representing multiple chemical classes or scaffolds rapidly," said Dr. Edward Maggio, President and Chief Executive Officer of SBI. "This proprietary capability of SBI will accelerate the next phase of the Human Genome Project as we computationally close the gap between the identification of novel gene sequences and small-molecule lead discovery. We are pleased to engage in this collaboration with one of the finest pharmaceutical research organizations anywhere."

SBI scientists use gene sequence information to build 3-D protein structures computationally using homology modeling extensively augmented by proprietary energy-based methodologies. The fine dynamic surface features of the protein model are then analyzed using additional proprietary methods to identify and create one or more virtual constructs of the predicted shape of small-molecule antagonists or inhibitors. These constructs, called DynaPharm^TM templates, are used to screen computationally both commercially available chemical libraries and SBI's proprietary virtual combinatorial databases (CombiLibs^TM) to generate a small number of rank-ordered compounds for synthesis or purchase and in vitro testing. Subsequently, in vitro biological assays reveal a typical hit rate in the range of 5-20%. The entire discovery process, including synthesis and in vitro testing, has, in some cases, been conducted in as short a period as 3 to 6 months. This approach is equally applicable to structures derived from X-ray crystallography or NMR studies, as well as for the computational structures produced by SBI's augmented homology modeling methods.

Dr. Maggio said, "SBI's use of its dynamic protein structure technologies to focus combinatorial synthesis has a major impact upon the speed and cost of drug discovery efforts. Our technology makes it possible to take maximum advantage of the availability of thousands of new protein targets from the Human Genome Project and other efforts and the availability of molecular diversity through combinatorial chemistry."

DuPont Pharmaceuticals is a worldwide business that focuses on research, development, and delivery of pharmaceuticals to treat unmet medical needs in the fights against HIV, cardiovascular disease, central nervous system disorders, cancer and arthritis-related disorders. DuPont Pharmaceuticals is also a leader in medical imaging.

Founded in 1802, DuPont is a global research and technology-based company committed to better things for better living. DuPont serves worldwide markets including food and nutrition; health care; agriculture; fashion and apparel; home and construction; electronics; and transportation. The company operates in about 70 countries and has 83,000 employees.

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 sequence information using comparative modeling augmented with energy-based methods. 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.