News

January 21, 2004 - ALTANA Pharma selects Cyprotex for drug discovery support

Cyprotex (LSE: CRX) today announces an agreement with ALTANA Pharma AG to provide drug discovery support using its Cloe Screen™ technology.

In the agreement, Cyprotex will screen batches of ALTANA compounds across three assays on a monthly basis to provide essential information on their metabolism by the liver. These tests use Cyprotex's high throughput in vitro screening system known as Cloe Screen™ which profiles compounds for absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME) properties. This agreement comes after a period of evaluation of Cyprotex's Cloe Screen™ technology by ALTANA Pharma which demonstrated it could consistently deliver accurate information on discovery compounds that would be valuable for supporting effective decision-making on the selection and improvement strategies of ALTANA's discovery compounds. The agreement has been set to run for a year and has the capacity to be extended to additional assays.

Cloe Screen™ has been targeted at avoiding significant effort and cost involved in later stage failures by providing a high quality and cost-efficient solution for screening compounds in the early stages of the drug discovery process. Cloe Screen™ cost efficiencies are due to a highly automated plate-based approach to compound screening which has been developed exclusively by Cyprotex scientists.

Commenting on the agreement with ALTANA Pharma, Robert Atwater, Chief Executive Officer at Cyprotex, said: "Our Cloe Screen™ service has consistently shown excellence in delivering quality data at impressive levels of cost efficiency within the tight timelines required to support our partners in drug discovery. We are pleased that ALTANA have chosen to work with us as it gives a further validation of our business."

Dr. Karl Zech, Vice President, Pre-Clinical Development at ALTANA Pharma said: "We are satisfied that Cyprotex can provide a quality service for the determination of important information on our novel compounds which will help us to progress our drug discovery projects."

For further information:

Robert Atwater, Chairman and Chief Executive
Cyprotex plc
Tel: +44 (0) 1625 505100
rmatwater@cyprotex.com
www.cyprotex.com

Henry Harrison-Topham / Heather Salmond
Bankside Consultants Limited
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7444 4140
heather.salmond@bankside.com
www.bankside.com