Sareum Regulatory News (SAR)

19 Oct 2006 10:43

Sareum Holdings PLC19 October 2006 For immediate release 19 October 2006 SAREUM HOLDINGS PLC ("Sareum" or "the Company") AGM Statement Sareum Holdings plc (AIM: SAR), the specialist structure-based drug discoverybusiness, is pleased to announce that, at the Company's AGM held at 10am thismorning, all resolutions were passed. At the Meeting, the Company's Chairman, DrPaul Harper, made the following statement: "During the current financial period (1 July 2006 to date) we have continued todeliver increasing value in our in-house research whilst expanding our strongclient base. Activities have included: • Substantial progress with our in-house cancer collaboration with the Institute of Cancer Research through the discovery of novel compound series that show efficacy in cancer cell models. This program is on-track to nominate a drug candidate for pre-clinical development in mid-2007. • The latest of a total of three multi-disciplinary drug discovery collaborations having average potential values in excess of £1.5million, with PIramed Ltd, plus good progress in our existing collaborations with Organon and Idenix • A cancer collaboration with Roche, providing high throughput protein structure determination supporting Roche's search for improved cancer therapeutics. This is testimony that Sareum has established itself as partner of choice with major pharmaceutical companies. • Repeat business with Almirall and Lundbeck - proving that the high-level services offered by Sareum are valued by our existing clients. • Our internal drug discovery pipeline continues to be developed and our strengthened client base provides funding to move this forward. The total (success dependent) revenues from this new and repeat businesspotentially amounts to approx £1.75M, with up to £860K able to be invoicedduring the current financial year. Additionally, our ongoing collaborationswith Idenix, Organon, UCB and Sirtris, have a success dependent potentialremaining value of approx £2.5M, thus we are confident that we are on-track tomeet our revenue targets for the year." For further information please contact: Sareum Holdings +44 (0) 1223 497700 Tim Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer Buchanan Communications +44 (0) 20 7466 5000 Tim Anderson, Mary-Jane Johnson About Sareum Holdings plc Sareum Holdings plc is a structure-based drug discovery business headquarteredin Cambridge, UK. Sareum Limited was formed in August 2003 to discover new drugsfor the treatment of cancer and to provide a range of drug discovery services tothe pharmaceutical industry. Sareum's unique approach aims to halve the time ittakes to discover new drug candidates. A structure-based approach to drug discovery relies on knowledge of thethree-dimensional structure of the proteins that cause disease. Once thestructure is known, potential drugs are designed to 'lock-in' to the proteinwith the aim of reversing or arresting a disease's progression. Knowledge of thestructure of the potential drugs and how they 'lock-in' to the protein permitsthe best potential drug to be discovered. Determining structure is a complextask and requires leading-edge equipment and experienced staff. Sareum'sapproach to structure determination is to produce multiple recombinant proteinsprimarily through a baculovirus expression system and to determine theirstructure using x-ray crystallography. When the structure is determined, the Company's innovative Template Screeningplatform is used to identify novel chemical starting material designed tointeract with the target protein. Sareum then uses its high-throughput medicinalchemistry platform to rapidly optimise these molecules and develop the mostpromising into potential drug candidates. Sareum provides its specialist drug discovery capabilities to partners in thepharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The Company aims to successfullydeliver: Programmes for complete gene-to-candidate structure-based discovery;projects to accelerate or improve the productivity of specific activities; anddrug candidates for licensing at the Phase I or Phase II clinical trials stage. Sareum joined the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange in October 2004 andtrades under the symbol SAR. For further information, please visitwww.sareum.co.uk This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange