12 September 2002

F2G Ltd and ASINEX Announce Drug Discovery Collaboration

ASINEX Ltd, a leading European provider of Lead Generation and Optimization services, today announce a drug discovery collaboration with F2G Ltd, Manchester, UK, a leading drug discovery company specialising in developing new treatments for systemic fungal infection, to carry out screening against a variety of targets and whole cell screens using ASINEX's compounds. Financial details have not been disclosed.

ASINEX will provide F2G with selected compounds from within their library and allow F2G to screen and develop these compounds as anti-fungal drugs. Screening will be conducted at F2G's laboratory in Manchester, UK. As active compounds suitable for pre-clinical and clinical development are identified and selected, the intellectual property rights of these compounds will belong to F2G.

Alex Lemon, Business Development Manager at F2G said, "This alliance with ASINEX represents an important relationship for F2G and offers a potentially broader collaboration in time. The quality of the ASINEX compounds and their chemistry expertise will form the basis of an excellent long-term association. We believe there are specific areas of chemistry within the Asinex library that will be particularly valuable to F2G"

Dimitri Genis, CEO of ASINEX commented on the collaboration: "This alliance is a significant development for ASINEX. We have progressed greatly in the last 2 years, and are now much more than just a supplier of compounds. We are becoming increasingly imaginative in our business strategy, and we hope that this will be the first of many such deals. F2G is an emerging leader in the area of anti-fungal drug discovery, and we are looking forward to working with them."

ASINEX (www.asinex.com) is a full-service chemistry provider of 'Intelligent Chemistry` for the lead generation and optimization stage of drug discovery. Well known as a supplier of diverse, small molecule libraries for screening and building blocks for combinatorial chemistry, ASINEX has developed a reputation for cost-effective and efficient Lead Optimization, Custom Synthesis and Focused Library Generation. Kinase, GPCR and Ion-Channel targeted libraries have recently been launched. Based in Moscow, with a total of 104 chemists (41 PhDs), 8 computational (6 PhDs) chemists and 17 biologists (11 PhDs), ASINEX has powerful drug discovery resources.

F2G (www.f2g.com) are a leading antifungal drug discovery company with a genomics based platform technology that identifies and validates essential gene targets within Aspergillus fumigatus. F2G also has established broad-based whole cell screening capabilities, animal models, medicinal chemistry and development expertise. F2G plan to use these targets and whole cell screens to discover broad-spectrum antifungal agents. F2G were formed in 1998 and are based in Manchester, United Kingdom.

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