For Immediate Release, March 11, 2002

TORONTO, ONTARIO (March 11, 2002) – Affinium Pharmaceuticals, a leader in structure guided drug discovery, today announced the appointment of Dr. Christian Burks as Chief Scientific Officer.

Dr. Burks is a recognized leader in drug discovery knowledge management. Prior to joining Affinium, Dr. Burks was Vice President and Chief Informatics Officer at Exelixis, Inc., (Nasdaq: EXEL), a global biotechnology company, where he was responsible for a department spanning computational target discovery and computational drug discovery in the context of comparative genomics and model system genetics. Prior to joining Exelixis in 1997, Dr. Burks was Group Leader for Theoretical Biology and Biophysics and Program Manager for Computational Biology at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he led the GenBank database project as well as other database projects from 1982 to 1996. Dr. Burks received his B.A. from St. John’s College and his Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University.

“Dr. Burks’ previous industry experience and demonstrated success in establishing a premiere informatics platform encompassing genomics, proteomics, and chemistry, along with his understanding of the knowledge flow linking target identification and prioritization to the screening of chemical compounds that leads to drug discovery, make him an ideal addition to Affinium’s executive management team,” said Dr. John D. Mendlein, Chairman and CEO of Affinium Pharmaceuticals. “Christian’s entrance into the structure-based drug design arena is further validation of Affinium’s approach: integrating multi-disciplinary processes to create a knowledge-based discovery pipeline. As we move forward, we will also benefit tremendously from his previous industry experience as a member of senior management with a company that grew twenty-fold over five years, acquiring four other companies, negotiating several major pharmaceutical deals, and carrying out a successful IPO in the process.”

Affinium Pharmaceuticals is a structure guided drug discovery company. The Company’s proprietary, integrated drug discovery process is designed for rapid advancement of small molecule programs from gene to clinic. The Company’s processes enable high throughput target production, determination of target function/structure, and determination of target structure with bound hits and leads to accelerate chemistry for new medicines. The Company also integrates the premier discovery capabilities of Aurora Biosciences to advance Affinium’s internal drug discovery efforts. Affinium’s processes feature mass spectrometry, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography technologies from Bruker Daltonics (Nasdaq: BDAL), Bruker BioSpin and Bruker AXS (Nasdaq: BAXS), respectively. The Company’s investors include the Lombard Odier Immunology Fund, Genesys Capital Partners Inc., and HBM BioVentures (Henri B. Meier, Chairman), as well as industrial partners Aurora Biosciences and the Bruker Companies. The Company’s Founders, Drs. Aled Edwards, Cheryl Arrowsmith and Jack Greenblatt, are world experts in determination of target function and structure and remain actively involved in the Company. The Company has raised US $33 million since its inception in 2000.

AFFINIUM and AFFINIUM PHARMACEUTICALS are trade-mark names of Integrative Proteomics, Inc.