22, October 2007

SAREUM HOLDINGS PLC

(“Sareum” or “the Company”) 

Fundraising

Sareum Holdings plc (AIM: SAR), the specialist structure-based drug discovery business, is pleased to announce that it has agreed to place 138,888,889 Ordinary Shares of 0.025p nominal value at a price of 0.9p per share to raise £1.25 million before expenses. 25,944,889 of these shares are being placed subject to approval at the Company’s AGM on 15 November 2007.

Mr and Mrs Leonard Licht have agreed to subscribe to 33,333,333 new Ordinary Shares and together will hold 13.43% of the Company's enlarged issued share capital¹. The Directors of the Company have agreed to subscribe to 2,000,000 new Ordinary Shares. The remainder is being placed with clients of the Company’s broker, Ellis Stockbrokers Limited.

Mr Leonard Licht is a Partner of Hg Capital and previously has been a former founding director and Vice Chairman of Mercury Asset Management and the Deputy Chairman of Jupiter Tyndall Group.

The funds raised from this share issue will used to advance the Company’s in-house development pipeline of cancer drug candidates and to provide additional working capital.

The Directors share purchases are:

Application has been made for the admission of 112,944,000 shares to trading on AIM with admission expected to take place on 26 October 2007. Application will be made for the admission of 25,944,889 shares to trading on AIM with admission expected to take place on 21 November 2007.

¹ Percentage of share capital assuming AGM approval for the issue of 25,944,889 new Ordinary Shares.

Commenting on the announcement, Sareum's Chief Executive Officer, Dr Tim Mitchell said: "This placing will provide valuable funds to advance our in-house cancer programs towards a stage where they become attractive licencing opportunities. We are also very pleased that Mr and Mrs Licht have chosen to increase their shareholding in Sareum.”

For further information:

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About Sareum Holdings plc

Sareum Holdings plc is a structure-based drug discovery business headquartered in Cambridge, UK. The Company was formed in August 2003 to discover new drugs for the treatment of cancer.  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 their target protein assists greatly in the development of high-quality drug candidates.  Determining structure is a complex task and requires leading-edge equipment and experienced staff.  Sareum’s approach to structure determination utilises its proprietary protein expression platform in order to produce multiple recombinant proteins that accelerate structure determination using x-ray crystallography.

Once the structure is determined, the Company’s innovative fragment screening platform is used to identify novel chemical templates 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 aims to successfully deliver drug candidates for licensing to larger pharmaceutical companies at the pre-clinical or early clinical trials stage.  This is funded by provision of its specialist drug discovery capabilities to partners in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

Sareum joined the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange in October 2004 and trades under the symbol SAR.  For further information, please visit www.sareum.co.uk