Cetek Raises $10 Million to Advance Drug Discovery and Development; Company Building Proprietary Compound Pipeline in Cancer and Infectious Disease; Company Also Announces Scientific Advisory Board.

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- Cetek Corporation announced it has raised $10 million to advance its proprietary drug discovery platform and its emerging pipeline of compounds to treat cancer and infectious diseases. The company also announced the formation of a scientific advisory board of world leading experts in oncology, infectious disease, clinical medicine and drug discovery.

Investors participating in the financing included Argonaut Private Equity, Ventry Industries LLC, Gainesbourgh Investments, James L. Waters, and Stata Ventures. All are existing investors in Cetek.

"Cetek has made impressive progress," commented Dr. Barry Berkowitz, President and CEO. "The financing is a vote of confidence in our technology, pipeline and business strategy. The recruitment of a prestigious advisory board underscores our evolution into a discovery and development organization as well as the potential of our approach.

"Our strategy is two-fold," Dr. Berkowitz added, "to leverage our drug discovery technologies through service agreements and collaborations, and to commercialize our compounds through strategic alliances." Cetek is well positioned in the current environment, with pharmaceutical and major biotechnology companies increasingly turning to novel, time and cost efficient approaches to drug discovery and to innovative earlier stage compounds to strengthen their pipelines."

Cetek pursues an integrated approach to drug discovery based upon its proprietary, high throughput capillary electrophoresis (CE Assay) screening technology and novel chemical biology-focused drug source. The CE Assay provides a number of distinct strengths that are particularly useful for drug discovery today. Many of proteomic and genomic targets, such as protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid interactions, and orphan drug targets that have been desirable but challenging for conventional high throughput screening technologies, are now efficiently accessible with the CE Assay. Cetek's proprietary CE Assays are integrated with drug sources, including its proprietary natural product libraries, enabling access to a wide range of chemical diversity for drug discovery.

Scientific Advisory Board

The Chairman of the Cetek Scientific Advisory board is Barry L. Karger, Ph.D., James L. Waters Chair in Analytical Chemistry and Biological Analysis at Northeastern University, and a Cetek founder. The other members of the board include:

--K. Frank Austen, M.D., AstraZeneca Professor of Respiratory and Inflammatory Disease at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital;

--James D. Griffin, M.D., Chairman, Dept. of Medical Oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School;

--Charles L. Cooney, Ph.D., Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at MIT; Co-Director of the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and Co-Director of the MIT Program on the Pharmaceutical Industry;

--Martin S. Hirsch, M.D., Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Immunology and Infectious Disease at Harvard School of Public Health; Infectious Disease Service at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

About Cetek

Cetek is a discovery and development stage pharmaceutical company built on proven, innovative technologies. Cetek is a leader in drug screening with a core technology based on a proprietary capillary electrophoresis screening (CE Assay) technology. The CE Assay technology provides unique advantages in drug discovery by enabling access to many target classes, including protein-protein targets, protein-nucleic acid targets, and targets of unknown function (orphans). With its CE Assay, drug sourcing and related discovery technologies, Cetek integrates chemistry, biology and engineering into an industrialized high throughput drug discovery operation. The company has successfully applied its technologies for collaborations with numerous other companies and internal drug discovery, with lead programs in cancer and virology. For more information, visit www.cetek.com.