SAN DIEGO, CA - (July 28, 1999) - Privately held Structural Bioinformatics Inc. ("SBI") of San Diego, California announced today that BioChem Pharma Inc. (Nasdaq: BCHE; TSE, ME: BCH) has entered into a second agreement with SBI for generating and optimizing lead compounds for the treatment of a human viral infectious disease. SBI entered into the first collaborative agreement with BioChem in August of 1997 to find leads for certain viral targets. In October of 1998, BioChem accepted the first lead compounds from the collaboration, triggering a milestone payment. Under the new agreement, BioChem Pharma has expanded its financial commitments, which encompass research funding, milestone and royalty payments.

Under this second agreement, SBI will work with BioChem Pharma scientists using SBI's proprietary protein modeling, DynaPharm^TM and CombiLib^TM technologies to identify and optimize lead molecules based upon novel chemical scaffolds to accelerate clinical candidate selection, produce back-up chemical series, and generate the broadest possible patent position relating to the selected target.

"BioChem Pharma has an aggressive development plan for novel, small molecule anti-viral compounds," said François Legault, EVP Corporate Development and Investments, BioChem Pharma. "Based upon the success of our initial collaboration, we look forward to SBI continuing to complement our drug discovery capabilities in this area."

"Naturally, we are very proud of our association with BioChem Pharma and the confidence they continue to place in SBI. As our initial partner, we welcome the opportunity to expand the relationship. We view the signing of this second agreement as another commercial validation of SBI's lead discovery technologies," said Dr. Ed Maggio, SBI's President and CEO.

BioChem Pharma Inc. is an international biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the research, development and commercialization of innovative products mainly for the prevention and treatment of human diseases, with a focus in cancer and infectious diseases. BioChem Pharma's website can be found at http://www.biochempharma.com.

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 structure generation and analysis. The company has developed advanced algorithms to calculate and refine the dynamic 3-D structure of proteins from sequence information using comparative modeling highly augmented with energy-based methods. SBI enables pharmaceutical companies to access rapidly the full range of molecular diversity available through combinatorial chemistry and the full range of protein targets revealed from worldwide human genome sequencing efforts by translating this data into structural information for use in rational drug design, molecular biology, molecular pharmacology, and structural pharmacogenomics.