St. Augustin and Munich, Germany April 14^th, 2008 — BioSolveIT GmbH and Proteros biostructures GmbH today announced that they have been awarded a three-year development grant from the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF), through its BioChance programme. With the FragScreen project, the German ministry supports the development of fragment-based screening technologies. The objective of this project is to develop and validate an integrated experimental and computational approach to determine binding of low-molecular weight compounds and molecular probes.

Both companies will work in partnership with the world-renowned research group of Prof. Dr. Gerhard Klebe at the University of Marburg. The consortium is completed by two Top25 global pharmaceutical companies which will contribute to the project from the perspective of the industry requirements. The award highlights the German government's recognition of the need to build joint development teams between leading academic institutions and industrial partners small and large to bridge the gap between the research lab and the marketplace, stimulating prosperity through innovation.

"Today, fragment-based technologies are among the hottest topics in this industry", says Dr. Christian Lemmen, CEO of BioSolveIT. "The FragScreen project will allow us to further improve and capitalize on our technological basis and to provide the pharma-industry with the most advanced applications available. We are very pleased to be able to further extend our lead in this field." "We too observe significant interest in the market for fragment-based drug discovery approaches. Success strongly depends on a highly efficient and industrialized pre-screening and X-ray structure analysis process, which supports the structure-guided growing of the small fragment compounds", said Dr. Torsten Neuefeind, CEO of Proteros biostructures GmbH, an international leader in the field of protein structure analysis services.