SAN DIEGO, CA - (August 23, 1999) - Privately-held Structural Bioinformatics Inc. (SBI) today announced the award of a USD $98,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, to develop non-peptide small molecules for asthma treatment. The grant, entitled "Structure-based Design of Novel IL5 Receptor Antagonists," will enable SBI scientists to apply the Company's proprietary protein modeling and dynamic pharmacophore-based searching of existing and virtual combinatorial libraries to rapidly identify and synthesize putative small-molecule interleukin-5 (IL-5) antagonists.

Asthma is the leading cause of chronic illness in childhood. It is estimated to occur in 5% to 10% of children at some time during their development. Currently, asthma effects an estimated 10 to 15 million people and claims the lives of more than 4,000 people every year in the United States. During the last decade, the number of asthma cases, hospitalizations and deaths has been increasing. Moreover, evidence shows that asthma is increasing in prevalence and severity, especially in westernized societies. Thus far, treatment of asthma has been based on conventional immunotherapy, corticosteroids (inhaled and systemic), leukotriene antagonists and symptomatic treatments. However, prolonged use of these drugs could lead to the development of tachyphylaxis and other serious side effects. An orally active IL-5 receptor antagonist may offer a significant advancement as a mechanism-based asthma treatment.

"We are very pleased to receive this third SBIR grant to apply our lead-finding technology to yet another therapeutic area," remarked Dr. Edward Maggio, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Structural Bioinformatics Inc. "Our first SBIR grant announced several months ago is for the discovery and development of HER2 antagonists as potential therapeutics for the treatment of breast, prostate and colon cancers. The second is to develop non-peptide small-molecule inhibitors targeting a bacterial metalloproteinase. In each of these cases, the grants will enable SBI scientists to apply the Company's proprietary protein modeling and drug discovery technologies to identify and synthesize putative small-molecule inhibitors rapidly."

Structural Bioinformatics Inc. accelerates drug 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 the full range of protein targets revealed from worldwide human genome sequencing efforts rapidly by translating this data into structural information for use in rational drug design, molecular biology, molecular pharmacology and structural pharmacogenomics. Its SBdBase^TM database provides a steadily growing encyclopedic structural resource containing over 150 protein families and thousands of individual structures for which no crystal structures are currently available. SBI's SVdBase^TM is a collection of structural variant databases each consisting of many high quality protein structures generated from sequence variants derived from many individuals for a single drug target.