Business Editors and Health Writers

SAN DIEGO, CA -- October 15, 1997 (Business Wire) - Privately held Structural Bioinformatics Inc. ("SBI") of San Diego, California announced today an agreement with a major Japanese pharmaceutical company to design novel compounds based on SBI's proprietary Dynapharmtm technology.

"SBI has extended its reach into Asia Pacific with this collaboration," says Edward T. Maggio, President and CEO of SBI. "The strategic fit with our new partner is particularly good, and the project is an important application of our ability to do virtual chemical screening with SBI's dynamically-modeled templates of protein active sites."

In this collaboration, SBI will computationally screen and identify low molecular weight compounds that interact with a certain target receptor protein, and the Japanese company will test the activities of the identified compounds. Based on the data obtained, the two companies will further screen and/or synthesize compounds with higher activities, and hope to find an attractive drug lead in a relatively short timeframe.

This is SBI's second corporate alliance. In addition to this Japanese company, which has requested that its name not be disclosed at this time, SBI also recently announced a lead-finding deal with BioChem Pharma Ltd. (Canada), and pursues in-house lead discovery and development in the United States.

Structural Bioinformatics has developed a supercomputational operating system making possible the immediate and practical use of genomic (gene sequence) data in a broad range of structure-based drug discovery and design processes leading to the rapid design and identification of small molecule lead compounds. SBI is building corporate partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, gene discovery companies, and combinatorial chemistry companies ranging from broad technology collaborations to assistance with specific drug targets or target groups.