Sareum Holdings plc (AIM: SAR), the specialist structure-based drug discovery and services business, is pleased to announce its financial results for the six month period ended 31 December 2005.

Business Highlights during period 1 July to 31 December 05:

• Major in-house drug discovery collaboration with leading cancer centres
• Crystal Bank protein structure resource launched
• Four-fold increase in revenues to £361,000 plus a further £302,000 in deferred revenue; ahead of Board expectations
• Four-fold reduction in cash outflow before financing
• Multi-disciplinary drug discovery collaboration with Organon
• New protein structure collaborations with international pharmaceutical companies.

Post-period end highlights:

• $5M Research collaboration with Idenix Pharmaceuticals
• Exercise of £500,000 Put and Call option
• Crystal Bank collaboration with UCB
• Total current order book, depending on success, of £4 Million

Dr Tim Mitchell, CEO of Sareum Holdings plc, said: "Sareum has enjoyed yet another productive and successful period. The Company has enhanced its in-house drug discovery and secured revenue-generating collaborations with a further six international pharmaceutical companies. We continue to move closer to our goal of fully funding valuable cancer research programs from our sales revenues."

For further information please contact:

Sareum Holdings plc          01223 497700
Tim Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer

Buchanan Communications        020 7466 5000
Tim Anderson, Mary-Jane Johnson

The full report is available as a pdf document: Financial results for the six months ended 31/12/05

Notes for Editors

About Sareum Holdings plc

Sareum Holdings plc is a structure-based drug discovery business headquartered in Cambridge, UK. Sareum Limited was formed in August 2003 to discover new drugs for the treatment of cancer and to provide a range of drug discovery services to the pharmaceutical industry. Sareum's unique approach aims to halve the time it takes to discover new drug candidates.

A structure-based approach to drug discovery relies on knowledge of the three-dimensional structure of the proteins that cause disease. Once the structure is known, potential drugs are designed to 'lock-in' to the protein with the aim of reversing or arresting a disease's progression. Knowledge of the structure of the potential drugs and how they 'lock-in' to the protein permits the best potential drug to be discovered. Determining structure is a complex task and requires leading-edge equipment and experienced staff. Sareum's approach to structure determination is to produce multiple recombinant proteins primarily through a baculovirus expression system and to determine their structure using x-ray crystallography.

When the structure is determined, the Company's innovative Template Screening platform is used to identify novel chemical starting material designed to interact with the target protein. Sareum then uses its high-throughput medicinal chemistry platform to rapidly optimise these molecules and develop the most promising into potential drug candidates.

Sareum provides its specialist drug discovery capabilities to partners in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The Company aims to successfully deliver: Programmes for complete gene-to-candidate structure-based discovery; projects to accelerate or improve the productivity of specific activities; and drug candidates for licensing at the Phase I or Phase II clinical trials stage.

Sareum joined the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange in October 2004 and trades under the symbol SAR.