Bionaut Pharmaceuticals Announces Research Collaboration with the National Cancer Institute; Collaboration to Profile Lead Compounds and Discover Biomarkers for Cancer.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Bionaut Pharmaceuticals, Inc. announced today a research collaboration with the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to profile Bionaut cancer compounds that inhibit the ability of tumor cells to survive various stress conditions. NCI and Bionaut will also collaborate to identify new biomarkers in tumor cells that are affected by Bionaut's lead cancer compounds.

Bionaut will provide to the collaboration its lead compounds which have been shown to modulate stress response in tumors. NCI will test Bionaut's compounds against a panel of tumor cell lines and measure biomarkers that are induced or suppressed. NCI will also evaluate Bionaut's compounds for their therapeutic potential to alter metastasis by testing for suppression of invasion/migration in vitro with several highly metastatic cell lines. Increased metastasis of tumor cells is often associated with the ability of these cells to survive stress.

"This collaboration is unique as it brings Bionaut's expertise in a novel pathway, our lead compounds and our Sentinel(R) Pathway Reporter System together with NCI's own expertise and NCI's panel of tumor cell lines for testing and identifying new anti-cancer drugs and biomarkers," said Thomas Klein, Chief Operating Officer. "This collaboration is also highly relevant to the FDA's initiatives to identify biomarkers associated with cancer to monitor experimental treatments and predict clinical outcome."

Bionaut's Cancer Program

Cellular signaling pathways regulate proliferation, angiogenesis and cell death. Cancer cells have adapted these pathways to allow tumors to survive and grow under stress conditions. In addition, exposure to most chemotherapeutic agents further induces stress. Responding to this stress, some cancer cells survive chemotherapy by secreting growth factors which are responsible for proliferation and angiogenesis by blocking cell death and initiating drug resistance.

Bionaut has applied its Sentinel(R) Pathway Reporter System to selectively measure the activity of cellular signaling pathways in cancer cells. Bionaut has identified BNC4, as well as other compounds in this class, which specifically inhibit the ability of cancer cells to grow under stress conditions in a variety of in vitro studies. Excellent in vivo activity has been demonstrated in human renal, pancreatic and non-small cell lung cancer xenograft models.

Bionaut Pharmaceuticals

Bionaut's business strategy is to discover novel small molecule drug candidates that affect well-validated disease pathways and to advance such discoveries through late stage pre-clinical status for further development in partnership with pharmaceutical and large biotechnology companies. Bionaut employs its patented Sentinel(R) Pathway Reporter System to initiate the discovery process. Bionaut's Sentinel(R) system can greatly increase the chances of a positive clinical outcome for a new drug candidate by correlating pathway-specific interference directly with disease modulation in living human cells. Bionaut has applied the highly predictive capabilities of its Sentinel(R) system to build a pipeline of its own drug candidates in the areas of cancer and inflammation and continues to expand its efforts into other therapeutic areas. In addition, Bionaut will assist strategic partners with drug discovery and lead optimization in disease areas of their choice. More information about Bionaut can be found on the Company's website at www.bionautpharma.com.