Cetek Corporation and Cubist Pharmaceuticals Expand Collaboration.

Business Editors &Health/Medical Writers

BIOWIRE2K

MARLBOROUGH, Mass.--(BW HealthWire)--Jan. 20, 2000

Cetek Corporation announced today the signing of a collaboration with Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:CBST) for the development of novel, anti-infective high throughput screening assays. Under the agreement, Cetek will develop their capillary electrophoresis (CE) assays for a proprietary Cubist target and will screen the assays against Cubist's compound libraries. The parties have previously completed a pilot study research project.

&uot;We began working with Cetek earlier this year and found that their technology complements our VITA(TM) technology and allows us to pursue additional anti-infective targets,&uot; said Dennis Keith, Ph.D., Vice President, Drug Discovery at Cubist. &uot;We expect that Cetek's fast assay development will quickly provide us results on the binding of small molecules to novel new targets.&uot;

&uot;Working with Cubist has allowed us to expand our technology into new assay formats for high-throughput screening,&uot; said Dr. Dallas Hughes, Vice President, Technology at Cetek. &uot;We are pleased to be collaborating with Cubist in helping them find high quality, small molecule drug candidates for discovery and development.&uot;

Cubist's VITA(TM) technology generates functional biology data useful for prioritizing the most valuable protein therapeutic targets from clinically important pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli for the discovery of new anti-infectives. Macromolecules that bind to functionally relevant sites on a target are used to validate the target for drug discovery and serve as tools for high throughput competitive binding assays to identify quality, small molecule leads for medicinal chemistry programs. VITA(TM) is broadly applicable to the in vivo validation and screening of a number of different targets, including proteins encoded by open reading frames (ORFs),

which have previously been intractable to traditional screening paradigms.

Founded in 1996, Cetek Corporation has developed a new technology that can rapidly develop newly discovered targets into a high-throughput screening format. This approach enhances the ability to quickly discover valuable &uot;hits&uot; in synthetic libraries, combinatorial mixtures, and natural product extracts. The technology was originally developed at the Barnett Institute of Northeastern University by Dr. Hughes and Prof. Barry Karger and is licensed exclusively to Cetek. This proprietary technology combines laser-induced fluorescence or UV detection with high resolution CE.

Cetek focuses on collaborating with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to derive benefits from this powerful screening technology. The company is a privately held drug discovery company with laboratories located in Marlborough, MA.

For additional information, visit the Companies Internet web sites at http://www.cetek.com or at http://www.cubist.com or contact Dr. James N. Little, Senior Vice President, at [phone] or [e-mail].