For Immediate Release, May 2, 2002

TORONTO, ONTARIO (May 2, 2002) – Affinium Pharmaceuticals, a leader in structure guided drug discovery, is proud to announce the election of Dr. Tak Wah Mak and Dr. Michael Levitt to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Mak is a member of Affinium’s Board of Directors and was elected as a foreign associate; Dr. Levitt is a member of Affinium’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Dr. Aled Edwards, Affinium’s co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor, said of the elections, “Affinium integrates people from diverse scientific disciplines to achieve breakthroughs in medicine. That the achievements of Drs. Mak and Levitt, in unrelated fields, have been recognized by the National Academy of Sciences is emblematic of the synergy between disciplines Affinium has achieved in drug discovery.”

Dr. Tak Wah Mak is University Professor in the Departments of Medical Biophysics and Immunology, University of Toronto, and Vice President of Research and founding Director of the Amgen Institute in Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Alberta in 1972, after completing undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Mak is currently a member of the Board of the Immunology Fund, Lombard Odier Bank of Geneva, Switzerland; the Advisory Board on Cancer Genetics, National Cancer Institute (USA); and the Editorial Board of Cancer Cell, a new journal of Cell Press. He is also recipient of several honorary Doctoral degrees including Doctor of Medicine from the University of Zurich. Since 1974, he has been a senior staff scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute/Princess Margaret Hospital, where, from 1991-1993 he was Head of the Division of Cellular and Molecular Biology. Dr. Mak is the recipient of many honours, including the Gairdner International Prize, King Faisal International Prize for Medicine, the Sloan Prize, General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, and the Novartis Immunology Prize, Novartis Inc. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. His research focuses on the biology of the immune system and the pathogenesis of cancer, and the use of model systems to discover and characterize the molecular mechanisms underlying human disease.

Dr. Levitt currently chairs the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford University. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1971 from the University of Cambridge. He has held academic positions at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. He received the Federation of European Biochemical Societies Anniversary Prize in 1986, is on the editorial boards of Structure and Current Opinion in Structural Biology, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, London. His research focuses on modeling and analysis of protein structures, and understanding how the function of proteins can be predicted based on analysis of their amino acid sequence and three dimensional structure.

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. Affinium is actively engaged on its own internal small molecule programs. The Company’s processes enable high throughput target production, determination of target function and 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.

Affinium and Affinium Pharmaceuticals are trademark names of the Company.