ARIAD Appoints Maryann Krane, Formerly of Genetics Institute, to New Position of Vice President, Regulatory Affairs.

Business Editors

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 21, 2001

ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARIA) today announced the appointment of Ms. Maryann Krane to the newly created position of vice president, regulatory affairs.

Ms. Krane currently is senior director of regulatory affairs at Avant Immunotherapeutics, Inc. and most recently was head of regulatory affairs for global development of hemophilia and oncology products at Genetics Institute, Inc., a unit of American Home Products Corporation.

During Ms. Krane's fourteen years at Genetics Institute, she worked on the development and registration of several major pharmaceutical products, including recombinant Factor VIII and Factor IX. At ARIAD, Ms. Krane will be responsible for global product registration and quality assurance and will be a member of the Company's operations committee. Ms. Krane earned a B.S. in microbiology from the University of Massachusetts.

"Ms. Krane's wealth of experience in establishing regulatory strategies for worldwide registration, preparing global registration dossiers, overseeing the regulatory approval process, and working closely with regulatory authorities makes her ideally suited to lead regulatory affairs," said Harvey J. Berger, M.D., chairman and chief executive officer of ARIAD. "Maryann adds immeasurable strength to our drug development team."

Ms. Krane added, "Given the exciting data obtained to date on ARIAD's lead product candidates, advancing them through clinical development in concert with the FDA and other regulatory authorities will be my first priority."

ARIAD is developing a pipeline of innovative pharmaceutical products based on small molecule drugs and its proprietary gene regulation technology platforms. The Company effectively integrates functional genomics and proteomics, protein engineering, and structure-based drug design in its drug discovery process. ARIAD's lead product candidates - treatments for osteoporosis, cancer, anemia, and graft-vs-host disease, the major complication of bone marrow transplantation - all work through small-molecule regulation of cellular processes. ARIAD's benchmark gene regulation technologies, ARGENT(TM), RPD(TM), and RGE(TM), have been licensed to hundreds of academic institutions worldwide for scientific research. Commercial licenses to these technologies also are available to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to accelerate their drug discovery efforts and for collaborative development of novel products.

Additional information about ARIAD Pharmaceuticals can be found on the web at www.ariad.com.

Some of the matters discussed in this news release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, which include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding the ability of the Company to conduct preclinical and clinical studies and obtain product registrations, as well as risks and uncertainties relating to economic conditions, markets, products, competition, intellectual property, services and prices, key employees, future capital needs, dependence on its collaborators and other factors under the heading "Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements" in ARIAD's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2000 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.