Serenex, Inc. Raises $15 Million In Series B Financing To Leverage Proteomic And Drug Discovery Technologies

Durham, North Carolina, August 20, 2002 -- Serenex, Inc. announced today the successful completion of a Series B financing totaling $15 million. The financing was led by Intersouth Partners of Durham, NC and included new investors, Lilly BioVentures and Seaflower Ventures, as well as the existing founding investor, Mediphase Venture Partners. The investment will be used to fully optimize Serenex's Proteome Mining(tm) and Functional Proteome Fractionation(tm) technologies, and to deploy these technologies to successfully discover and develop novel therapeutics.

"We are very pleased with the caliber of our new investors, and excited about the advances that this financing will enable," states Dr. Robert Dishman, co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Serenex. "This allows us to rapidly advance the technologies developed by our scientific co-founder, Dr. Timothy Haystead of Duke University, and positions Serenex to play a leading role in improving the quality of drug candidates for its partners."

Founded in June 2001, Serenex, Inc., is focused on leveraging its proprietary technologies to improve the efficiency and quality of drug discovery throughout the value chain. The company's technologies allow target discovery, lead identification and toxicity profiling to be performed in parallel. This accelerates the entire process and it provides more complete selectivity information to guide decisions throughout lead optimization.

"We are excited to be working with Serenex and its world class management team to accelerate the discovery of new and effective therapeutics," commented Garheng Kong, M.D., Ph.D. of Intersouth Partners, the lead investors in the Series B financing.

According to Dr. Dishman, "We are excited to be able to take an active role in contributing to our collaborator's success in getting innovative new drugs to market more quickly. The company's proprietary technologies rationalize and simplify the processing of vast amounts of proteomic data to enable the better selection of drug candidates and leads, thereby compressing and accelerating the drug discovery process. We also see significant opportunities for Serenex technologies to develop its own innovative new therapeutic candidates."

About Serenex:
Serenex, Inc., a privately held biotechnology company with headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, is a frontrunner in the emerging field of functional proteomics. Serenex's approach is to isolate functionally significant and target rich sub-proteomes, screen with compound libraries and identify those compounds whose eluted protein targets have valuable therapeutic applications. By taking a functional proteomics approach, Serenex's technologies enable dramatic increases in screening efficiency for new therapeutics and their physiological targets, thus improving the speed of drug discovery. Serenex technologies have demonstrated utility in identifying new targets, preferred chemical scaffolds and opportunities to improve upon existing drugs. For more information on Serenex visit www.serenex.com.

About Intersouth Partners:
Located in Durham, North Carolina, Intersouth Partners is one of the largest and most experienced early-stage venture funds in the Southeast, having invested in over sixty private companies, primarily in the information technology and life sciences sectors. Founded in 1985, Intersouth Partners manages $300 million in five venture capital limited partnerships. For more information on Intersouth Partners, please contact Andrea Cook at (919) 493-6640 ext. 108, andrea@intersouth.com or visit www.intersouth.com.

Source: Serenex, Inc.