Last checked at 1 Jul 2008 16:39
Sareum Holdings PLC ('Sareum' or 'the Company')
Resignation of Non-Executive Director
Sareum Holdings plc (Sareum) (AIM: SAR), the specialist structure-based drug discovery business, announces today that Dr Alastair Riddell has resigned as a non-executive director of the Company with immediate effect.
Sareum Holdings
01223 497700
Tim Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer
Grant Thornton Corporate Finance
020 7383 5100
Philip Secrett/ Colin Aaronson
Buchanan Communications
020 7466 5000
Tim Anderson, Mary-Jane Johnson
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About Sareum Holdings plc
Sareum Holdings plc is a structure-based drug discovery business headquartered in Cambridge, UK. The Company was formed in August 2003 to discover new drugs for the treatment of cancer. Sareum's unique approach aims to halve the time it takes to discover new drug candidates.
A structure-based approach to drug discovery relies on knowledge of the three-dimensional structure of the proteins that cause disease. Once the structure is known, potential drugs are designed to 'lock-in' to the protein with the aim of reversing or arresting a disease's progression. Knowledge of the structure of the potential drugs and how they 'lock-in' to their target protein assists greatly in the development of high-quality drug candidates. Determining structure is a complex task and requires leading-edge equipment and experienced staff. Sareum's approach to structure determination utilises its proprietary protein expression platform in order to produce multiple recombinant proteins that accelerate structure determination using x-ray crystallography.
Once the structure is determined, the Company's innovative fragment screening platform is used to identify novel chemical templates designed to interact with the target protein. Sareum then uses its high-throughput medicinal chemistry platform to rapidly optimise these molecules and develop the most promising into potential drug candidates.
Sareum aims to successfully deliver drug candidates for licensing to larger pharmaceutical companies at the pre-clinical or early clinical trials stage. This is funded by provision of its specialist drug discovery capabilities to partners in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
Sareum joined the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange in October 2004 and trades under the symbol SAR. For further information, please visit www.sareum.co.uk