Phytera, Inc. Withdraws Its Initial Public Offering

WORCESTER, Mass. (ots-PRNewswire) - Phytera, Inc. todayannounced that it has withdrawn its Initial Public Offering of2.5 million shares of Common Stock on the Copenhagen StockExchange and EASDAQ. Management restated that the Company was encouraged by thereception from prospective investors in the planned Offering,which was postponed in February 1999. Since that time, marketconditions have not been conducive to successfully completing theOffering with strong confidence in the after- market performanceof the Stock. Phytera's broad and integrated Combinatorial Drug DiscoveryProgram has enabled the Company to enter into six corporatepartnerships to date. Over the past year, Phytera has establishedfour new collaborations, with Eli Lilly & Co., ChironCorporation, NeuroSearch A/S and Galileo Laboratories, and hasexpanded an existing agreement with another corporate partner,Tsumura & Co. Phytera plans to continue its programs with itscurrent resources and revenues from these partnerships, andintends to access the capital markets later this year. Phytera's Combinatorial Drug Discovery Program applies theCompany's diverse plant and marine microbial extract libraries,high-throughput screening and combinatorial chemistrycapabilities to the identification and optimization of novel leadstructures and drug candidates. Phytera, Inc. is a biotechnologycompany headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts, with whollyowned subsidiaries in Sheffield, U.K., Copenhagen, Denmark andTastrup, 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 bepublished under the "CTK" slug. Protext is a commercial serviceproviding distribution of press releases from clients, who areidentified in the text of Protext reports and who bear fullresponsibility for their contents.

PROTEXT