Phytera, Inc. Withdraws Its Initial Public Offering

WORCESTER, Mass. (ots-PRNewswire) - Phytera, Inc. today announced that it has withdrawn its Initial Public Offering of 2.5 million shares of Common Stock on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange and EASDAQ. Management restated that the Company was encouraged by the reception from prospective investors in the planned Offering, which was postponed in February 1999. Since that time, market conditions have not been conducive to successfully completing the Offering with strong confidence in the after- market performance of the Stock. Phytera's broad and integrated Combinatorial Drug Discovery Program has enabled the Company to enter into six corporate partnerships to date. Over the past year, Phytera has established four new collaborations, with Eli Lilly & Co., Chiron Corporation, NeuroSearch A/S and Galileo Laboratories, and has expanded an existing agreement with another corporate partner, Tsumura & Co. Phytera plans to continue its programs with its current resources and revenues from these partnerships, and intends to access the capital markets later this year. Phytera's Combinatorial Drug Discovery Program applies the Company's diverse plant and marine microbial extract libraries, high-throughput screening and combinatorial chemistry capabilities to the identification and optimization of novel lead structures and drug candidates. Phytera, Inc. is a biotechnology company headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts, with wholly owned subsidiaries in Sheffield, U.K., Copenhagen, Denmark and Tastrup, Denmark. ots Original Text Service: Phytera, Inc. Internet: http://www.newsaktuell.de Contact: Malcolm Morville, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Phytera, Inc., 508-792-6800, or Robert Gottlieb of Feinstein Kean Partners, Inc., 617-577-8110 Subscribers please note that material bearing the slug "PROTEXT" is not part of CTK's news service and is not to be published under the "CTK" slug. Protext is a commercial service providing distribution of press releases from clients, who are identified in the text of Protext reports and who bear full responsibility for their contents. PROTEXT