Nuevolution Announces Receipt of Milestone Payment From Merck & Co., Inc.

COPENHAGEN, November 2, 2009 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Nuevolution A/S today announced that it has received a milestone payment derived from its collaboration with Merck & Co. Inc., Whitehouse Station, NJ.

The payment was triggered following identification of several candidate molecules that conformed to the prespecified criteria established under the terms of the original agreement. These include several accepted drug-like characteristics and nanomolar potency.

In its collaboration with Merck, Nuevolution is applying its proprietary Chemetics(R) technology to identify novel small molecule leads against drug targets of interest to Merck. Nuevolution has so far screened more than one billion small molecules against the first of the targets selected under the collaboration. The candidate molecules so far identified have been shown to disrupt an undisclosed, therapeutically relevant, protein-protein interaction in vitro.

"We are excited about the results that have been obtained thus far in the collaboration with Merck. Considering the complexity of the target, we believe that the results demonstrate the value of having access to hundreds of millions to billions of small molecules for screening," said Alex Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution A/S. "It is a great pleasure working with Merck's first class team of scientists, and we are looking forward to a continued fruitful outcome of the collaboration." Merck and Nuevolution entered into a collaboration in 2008. In April 2009, Nuevolution announced an expansion to the second phase of the collaboration.

About Nuevolution Nuevolution is a leading small molecule lead discovery company founded in 2001 and based in Copenhagen, Denmark. The company has developed Chemetics(R), a unique, patent protected hybrid of proven wet chemistry and molecular biology which represents the ultimate fragment based drug discovery technology.

Chemetics(R) enables rapid synthesis and DNA-tagging of hundreds of millions of chemically diverse drug-like small molecule compounds and the efficient screening of these, facilitating the identification of potent drug leads at unprecedented quantity, quality and speed compared to existing drug discovery technologies.

In June 2009, Nuevolutions library collection exceeded 1 billion small molecule compounds for screening.

Nuevolution partners its technology with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. In 2008, Nuevolution entered into collaborations with Merck & Co. and Lexicon Pharmaceuticals. The collaboration with Merck & Co. was expanded in April 2009. During summer 2009, Nuevolution has announced agreements with Novartis Pharma and GlaxoSmithKline.

Nuevolution has demonstrated the power of Chemetics(R) by identifying highly potent and drug like novel ligands with the potential to address major unmet medical needs across a range of therapeutic areas and target classes.

Nuevolution is a privately owned company and has raised EUR 37 million in financing from key Scandinavian investors, including SEB Venture, Sunstone Capital, SLS Invest and Novo A/S. For more information about Nuevolution A/S, please visit the company's website http://www.nuevolution.com For further details about Nuevolution and the Chemetics(R) technology please contact:

Nuevolution A/S

Alex Haahr Gouliaev, CEO

Phone: [phone]

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