Collaborative Agreement

Sareum Holdings PLC
09 November 2004


For immediate release                  9 November 2004





                                SAREUM HOLDINGS PLC

                          ("Sareum" or the "Company")

       Sareum Announces Protein Expression and Structure Determination

                        Collaboration with Inpharmatica



Sareum Holdings plc (AIM: SAR), the structure-based drug discovery and services
business admitted to AIM in October 2004, has entered into a collaborative
agreement with Inpharmatica Ltd. to express and determine the structures of
novel, genomics-derived Nuclear Receptor protein targets to support
Inpharmatica's drug discovery programmes.

This collaboration represents a major new deal for the recently floated Company
and is on a fee-for-service basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Sareum will
receive significant upfront and substantial success payments and options to
include further targets in the future, potentially representing more than 60% of
the budgeted revenues for the current financial year to 30 June 2005.

Sareum will utilise its skills and high-throughput processes to clone, express
and purify several of Inpharmatica's Nuclear Receptor targets and progress these
through structure determination. Nuclear Receptors are an important family of
druggable proteins of high therapeutic relevance in atherosclerosis, metabolic
diseases, oncology, inflammation, and central nervous system disorders.

Commenting on the agreement, Sareum's Chief Executive Officer, Dr Tim Mitchell,
said: "We are delighted to be providing drug discovery services to Inpharmatica.
  The contract marks our first as a quoted company.  Our expertise in
high-throughput protein expression is particularly suited to the progression of
these novel genomics targets and I look forward to a very successful outcome."



Commenting on the agreement, Inpharmatica's Chief Executive Officer, Dr Malcolm
Weir, said: "We are very pleased to be using Sareum's high-throughput
technologies to drive our internal drug discovery forward. The potential
structural information gained from this collaboration will significantly enhance
our ability to understand their function and optimise novel drug candidates
against these very important Nuclear Receptor targets."



For further information:


Sareum Holdings                                      01223 497700
Tim Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer

Buchanan Communications                              020 7466 5000
Mark Court, Mary-Jane Johnson



About Sareum Holdings plc

Sareum Holdings plc is a structure based drug discovery business headquartered
in Cambridge, UK. The Company was formed in August 2003 to discover new drugs
for the treatment of cancer and inflammation and to provide a range of drug
discovery services to the pharmaceutical industry. Sareum's unique approach aims
to halve the time it takes to discover new drug candidates.



Structure-based drug discovery involves the determination of a disease causing
protein's three-dimensional structure. Once the structure is known, novel
chemical entities are designed to 'lock-in' to the protein with the aim of
reversing or arresting a disease's progression.



Sareum's approach to structure based drug discovery is to produce multiple
recombinant proteins primarily through a baculovirus expression system;
determine their structure using x-ray crystallography; and then use the
Company's computational chemistry expertise to create virtual, focused libraries
of new chemical entities designed to interact with the target protein. Sareum
then uses its high-throughput medicinal chemistry platform to rapidly synthesise
these molecules and develop the most promising into potential drug candidates.



Sareum offers its accelerated drug discovery capabilities on a fee basis to the
pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Sareum intends to license out its
internally generated drug candidates at the Phase I or Phase II clinical trials
stage.



Sareum joined the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange in
October 2004 and trades under the symbol SAR.  For further information, please
visit www.sareum.co.uk


About Inpharmatica


Founded in 1998, Inpharmatica Ltd is a selective drug discovery company using
predictive technologies to improve speed and productivity. Focusing on highly
druggable targets, its unique proprietary platform, PharmaCartaTM, is an
integrated suite of informatics-based technologies fully capable of gene to
candidate operations. Inpharmatica's lead discovery programme is focused on
generating pre-clinical candidates against 16 novel Nuclear Receptors - proteins
widely considered to be both druggable and of high therapeutic interest. Other
significant programmes include novel secreted proteins/antibody targets, ion
channels, P450 enzymes, metalloproteinases and progestin receptors.



Inpharmatica's initial technology was based on research from Professor Janet
Thornton's group at University College London. The Company employs approximately
100 professionals at its UK locations in London and Cambridge, with business
development headed in North America. Inpharmatica has raised some £35.0m from
leading venture capitalists and has sales/collaboration partnerships with
Serono, Pfizer, GSK, Aventis, Daiichi, Riken, Taisho, UCB Pharma, MDL, Ionix,
CellZome and Galapagos.


                      This information is provided by RNS
            The company news service from the London Stock Exchange