Sareum Regulatory News (SAR)

25 Jun 2008 07:00



SAREUM HOLDINGS PLC

("Sareum" or the "Company")

Three Repeat Business Agreements Signed

Sareum Holdings plc (AIM: SAR), the specialist structure-based drug discovery business, is pleased to announce that it has secured three repeat business agreements with existing collaboration partners.

Under the terms of these agreements, Sareum will continue to apply its skills in high throughput protein structure determination to aid its collaboration partners in the development of new and improved therapeutics. In return, Sareum will receive undisclosed research fees and success-dependent milestone payments.

Whilst the Sareum directors are pleased to be announcing these agreements, they believe, as stated on 19 June, that the Company needs to undertake a strategic transaction and would need to effect a fundraising to enable it to complete such a transaction. The Directors continue to work towards this goal and a further announcement will be made in due course.

Commenting on this announcement, Sareum's Chief Executive Officer, Dr Tim Mitchell, said: "I am pleased to be announcing such positive news and three pieces of new business. This success in generating repeat fee for service business, whilst we seek to implement our previously announced strategic review, continues to demonstrate the commitment of our customers and the professionalism of our scientists."

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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