Kemia Makes Key Appointments to Take Drug Discovery From the Lab to Large Markets; New Execs Recruited from Hoffman-La Roche and AstraZeneca Bolster Kemia's Proof of Concept.

Business Editors and Health/Medical Writers

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SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 2002

Kemia, the new medicines company that utilizes novel chemistry to target protein-protein interactions, today announced it has filled two key positions on the company's scientific management team.

The new executives bring extensive pharmaceutical and commercial drug development experience more typically found in big pharmaceutical companies than in a start-up environment such as Kemia's.

Edward Roberts, Ph.D., will join Kemia as chief scientific officer and will lead the company's drug development efforts. Jan Lundstrom, Ph.D., will serve as vice president of biology, with responsibility for characterizing the biological activity of Kemia's lead compounds and establishing their ADME toxicity profiles.

"Ed and Jan bring big-league drug development experience that you just don't normally find in a startup," said Jeff Sollender, Kemia's acting CEO. "The fact that they were eager to join Kemia is testament to the tremendous medical and commercial potential of the technology."

Roberts is one of the world's foremost medicinal chemists, noted in academia and the pharmaceutical industry for his successful, more integrated approach to drug design. Before joining Kemia, he was senior vice president and head of discovery chemistry for F. Hoffman-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland. At Roche, he had overall responsibility for drug discovery chemistry done in the vascular, metabolic and CNS therapeutic areas. Roberts also formed a new research group for AstraZeneca, where he worked in the field of pain control on peripheral and central nervous system diseases. Previously at Warner Lambert/Parke-Davis in Cambridge, he is author and inventor on numerous original scientific articles and patents. Roberts obtained a B.Sc. with honors in biochemistry from the University of Sussex. He holds a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. Roberts was adjunct professor at McGill University and a member of the board of directors for CERCA. He helped establish the AstraZeneca Chair for Organic Chemistry at the University of Toronto.

"Kemia will be tackling the more difficult programs that big pharma doesn't have the chemical leads to address but that represent large markets," said Roberts. "The company's founders have identified scaffolds that have already been demonstrated as effective in some models. There is already some proof of concept."

Lundstrom most recently headed AstraZeneca's pharmacokinetic program and has 27 years of experience in preclinical drug development. A native of Sweden, Lundstrom holds a Ph.D. from the University of Uppsala and completed post-doctoral work as a Visiting Fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland (Laboratory of Chemistry, National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolic and Digestive Disease). He also has worked as chief pharmacist in the Pharmaceutics Department, National Board of Health and Welfare, Division of Drugs, in Stockholm.

"We have great science represented by the founders," said Lundstrom. "Our goal is to develop better therapies for diseases that currently can be treated and to create new medicines for diseases that today cannot be effectively treated at all."

Roberts and Lundstrom will apply the proprietary technology invented by Kemia's founders, Tamas Bartfai, Julius Rebek, Jr. and Andy Hamilton, to focus on clinically validated disease targets for illnesses that include rheumatoid arthritis, HIV and osteoporosis. Kemia's founders are among the first chemists to synthesize small molecule scaffolds capable of mimicking key secondary protein structures that can effectively stop the progress of certain diseases through orally administered treatments.

About Kemia

Kemia is a new medicines company utilizing novel chemistry to target protein-protein interactions for the development of orally administered treatments. Through the use of its proprietary chemical scaffolds the company can rapidly develop high-affinity small molecule leads against clinically validated targets with large commercial markets. Kemia's founders, advisors and management have a successful track record of bringing new medicines to market, having been involved with research groups that discovered and developed more than a dozen marketed drugs, representing over $10 billion in annual sales. Kemia began operations in May 2002 in San Diego, California and has raised initial financing from Alta Partners, Forward Ventures and Texas Pacific Ventures. Formore information, go to www.kemia.com.