Nuevolution Announces Progress in Its Collaboration With Merck & Co., Inc.

COPENHAGEN, April 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Nuevolution A/S today announced that Merck & Co. Inc. has chosen to proceed to the second phase of the collaboration agreement announced in June 2008 to apply Nuevolution's proprietary Chemetics(R) drug discovery technology to identify novel small molecule leads against several drug targets.

By entering the second phase, Merck gains access to a new multi-million member proprietary library of small molecule drug candidates. In addition, this development triggers the payment of an undisclosed technology access fee to Nuevolution from Merck.

"We are pleased with Merck's decision to proceed with the collaboration into its second phase," said Alex Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution A/S. "We look forward to decoding the active structures arising from this proprietary library."

About Nuevolution

Nuevolution is a leading drug 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.

Nuevolution partners its technology with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and is also developing an internal pipeline by applying Chemetics(R) to validated cancer and cardiovascular targets. 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 euro 37 million in financing from key Scandinavian investors, including SEB Venture, Sunstone Capital, SLS Venture and Novo A/S. For more information about Nuevolution A/S, please visit the company's website www.nuevolution.com

CONTACT: Alex Haahr Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution A/S, +45 7020 0987,
ahg@nuevolution.com

Web site: http://www.nuevolution.com/

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