Back FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PETER D. STAPLE APPOINTED CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF BIOSEEK - Pharmaceutical Executive Joins Company from ALZA Corporation - BURLINGAME, Calif. - March 12, 2002 - BioSeek, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on post-genomics drug discovery, today announced the appointment of Peter D. Staple as Chief Executive Officer. In this role, he will be responsible for leading BioSeek as it begins to apply its unique technology platforms commercially. Mr. Staple was also elected to BioSeek's Board of Directors. "Peter brings a wealth of industry experience to BioSeek," said Rolf Ehrhardt, BioSeek President and Co-founder. "As a young company, we are extremely gratified to attract someone of his stature and capabilities. Building on our Series A financing we announced last month, Peter's joining at this time provides a significant boost to help move the company rapidly forward and capitalize on our unique strengths in functional genomics and drug discovery. I personally look forward to working with him in bringing forth more exciting announcements later this year." "Bioseek represents an exciting opportunity in the important new field of systems biology," said Mr. Staple. "With a talented group of people and powerful new technologies, it has the potential to make fundamental improvements in the pharmaceutical drug discovery process. I look forward to working with the company to realize that potential." Mr. Staple joins BioSeek from ALZA Corporation, now a wholly-owned operating unit of Johnson & Johnson, where he most recently served as Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel. At ALZA for eight years, he played a central role in the transformation and rapid growth in ALZA's business and in the company's recent merger with Johnson & Johnson. Prior to ALZA, Mr. Staple spent over a decade in the biotechnology industry in senior positions at Cetus and Chiron Corporations, where his responsibilities included corporate partnering, licensing and financing transactions. Prior to entering the biotechnology industry, Mr. Staple worked as an attorney at Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe in San Francisco. He holds B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford University. In addition to Mr. Staple and Dr. Ehrhardt, the BioSeek Board of Directors includes Robert (Al) Beardsley, Ph.D., Simile Investors LLC; Fred Craves, Ph.D., Bay City Capital; Francois Meyer, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Drug Innovation, Aventis Pharmaceuticals; and Blake Winchell, Fremont Ventures. Background BioSeek addresses the need for more efficient and predictive drug discovery technologies and is focused on applying its proprietary technologies to the identification, validation and commercialization of therapeutic targets and human pharmaceuticals. BioSeek has developed a powerful systems biology/informatics platform that enables true functional characterization and prioritization of drugs and genes in disease-relevant high-throughput human biosystems. BioSeek's platform of human primary cell culture-based technologies utilize an innovative complex systems biology approach for earlier and more accurate selection of targets and compounds. With these, the company expects to dramatically reduce the time and cost of preclinical and clinical drug development, initially in the areas of inflammation, cardiovascular disease and oncology. In addition to Dr. Ehrhardt, the co-founders of BioSeek include Ellen L. Berg, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Eugene C. Butcher, M.D., Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University. Prior to founding BioSeek, Drs. Ehrhardt and Berg were senior scientists at Protein Design Laboratories, Inc. Dr. Butcher is Chairman of the BioSeek Scientific Advisory Board and, as a scientific co-founder of Leukosite, Inc, he has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, which merged with Leukosite in 1999.