Back FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE BioSeek Completes $8.4 Million Series A Financing BURLINGAME, Calif. - February 20, 2002 - BioSeek, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on post-genomics drug discovery, today announced that it has raised $8.4 million in its first round of venture financing. The Series A round investors are Bay City Capital, Fremont Ventures, SImile Investors LLC and Vanguard Ventures. "The successful completion of this initial financing is an important milestone for BioSeek," said Rolf O. Ehrhardt, M.D., Ph.D., President and Co-founder. "Not only does it provide the resources for us to aggressively develop and exploit our platforms for functional genomics and drug discovery, it also represents a significant external validation of our technology by a very strong group of investors." Fred Craves, Ph.D., Managing Director, Bay City Capital, said, "We invested in BioSeek because of the experience and pragmatic approach to their business by the founders and management team. The systems biology platform and data already generated provide a strong basis for early pharma partner opportunities and a cost effective tool for identifying leads for clinical development. We look forward to working with BioSeek to optimize their business model and build value." Blake Winchell, Managing Director, Fremont Group and General Partner, Fremont Ventures, commented, "The quality of BioSeek's science and management team is reflected by the quality of the investor syndicate in this oversubscribed round. BioSeek's platform addresses the critical need to validate targets and compounds early in the drug development process." 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. BioSeek1s 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 at all stages of preclinical and clinical development. 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 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 Inflammation Scientific Advisory Board of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, which merged with Leukosite in 1999. For more information, please call or e-mail Dr. Ehrhardt directly. -end-