Anadys Announces SBIR Grant Award in Riboproteomics -- Work to Focus On Structure Assisted Drug Design Using RNA as a Drug Target.

Business Editors/Health & Medical Writers

BIOWIRE2K

SAN DIEGO--(BW HealthWire)--Feb. 25, 2002

Anadys Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ("Anadys") announced today that it has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) entitled "Rational design of antibiotics targeted at the ribosome". The award is for $225,000 for Phase I of the SBIR grant. The work will focus on identifying novel antibiotics using structure-assisted drug design to discover and optimize small molecules that bind to and disrupt the function of the bacterial ribosome, a large riboprotein complex essential for survival in bacteria.

"The grant will allow Anadys to break new ground in antibacterial drug discovery," said Thomas Hermann, Ph.D., Principal Investigator for the grant. "For the first time, we will systematically exploit structural insight of RNA target recognition by some current antibiotics. We plan to use that information to design novel small molecules that retain antibacterial activity but that overcome known mechanisms of bacterial resistance and cellular toxicity. The development of drugs that specifically recognize RNA structures opens exciting new ways to greatly expand the existing repertoire of protein-targeted therapeutics."

"We are pleased that our scientific peers have recognized the promise of this approach to discover novel antibiotics," said Steve Worland, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Anadys. "Structure-assisted drug design has been used for over a decade against protein drug targets and we are pioneering this approach against RNA drug targets. Companies that have been successful using structural approaches have had both the ability to determine structures and the medicinal chemists who know how to use those structures to design novel small molecules. There are only a handful of companies that can currently solve structures of RNA:ligand complexes and only a handful of different companies that have the capability to use co-crystal structures to optimize drug candidates. We believe that Anadys is in an unparalleled position with both capabilities resident within a single company. We intend to use these capabilities to enhance and expedite several antibacterial and antiviral drug discovery programs."

About Anadys Pharmaceuticals

Anadys Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ("Anadys" or the "Company") is a new generation drug discovery company committed to applying an integrated approach that combines biology and chemistry to develop new small molecule therapeutics. The Company's initial therapeutic focus is in anti-infectives. Anadys has developed and implemented proprietary technologies (GATE(TM)) to identify novel antibacterial targets. The Company augments this set of targets with additional antibacterial and antiviral targets using its dominant expertise in Riboproteomics(TM), a phrase coined by the Company to describe the systematic study of RNA-related targets. RNA and RNA-protein complexes have been validated as targets for the treatment of infectious diseases with approved drugs such as neomycin, Zyvox(R), and Zithromax(R). The Company can screen targets for small molecule effectors using a proprietary ultra high-throughput affinity-based method for protein targets (ATLAS(TM)) and a proprietary method for RNA targets (SCAN(TM)). Compounds identified in screening are then advanced to drug development candidates using the Company's proprietary cheminformatics tools (including PROTOS(TM)) combined with a world-class high-output medicinal chemistry platform. Anadys intends to harness this integrated suite of technologies to propel a strong and continual pipeline of drug candidates into the clinic.

For more information, please visit www.anadyspharma.com.