Shuster brings more than 20 years of executive leadership experience in life sciences to Kemia, including past service as the CFO for Pharmacopeia and Human Genome Sciences where he led successful IPOs for both companies. Shuster also held several executive management positions at Invitrogen Corporation, including COO. In addition to his position as CFO at Pharmacopeia, he also served as the COO of Pharmacopeia Labs. Shuster previously held executive positions at Human Genome Sciences and Microbiological Associates (now BioReliance).

"We are extremely pleased that Lew will be applying his depth of experience in life science emerging companies to Kemia," said Kemia board member, Forward Ventures Partner Stan Fleming. "One of Kemia's greatest strengths has always been its world-class scientific staff. Now we have top notch life science business management to round out the team."

Shuster has served as an advisor to Kemia since early this year, following the death of the company's acting CEO, Forward Ventures Partner Jeffrey Sollender.

"Kemia has outstanding scientific leadership, distinguished scientific advisors, and novel, proprietary chemical scaffolds that together create a powerful 'engine' for discovering and developing new, small molecule medicines for medically important targets," said Shuster. "Our strengths apply to two large and as yet underdeveloped classes of small molecule drug opportunities -- alpha helix interactions and allosteric kinase inhibition. These classes of protein interactions include hundreds of potential drug discovery targets across many disease areas."

Kemia's first drug candidates, for inflammation, osteoporosis, and HIV, will enter initial in vivo efficacy testing in third party laboratories over the next several months. Kemia's lead candidate drugs are true small molecule drugs designed, in some instances, to replace existing marketed peptide or protein drugs. These new Kemia medicines thus offer the potential for a pill, tablet, or capsule to replace a drug administered today by costly and painful injections.

Investors in the third tranche of financing included Kemia's original venture capital funds -- Alta Partners, Forward Ventures, and Texas Pacific Group. In addition, Novartis BioVentures joined in the most recent round, which closed in June. This closing brings the cumulative Series A financing for Kemia to a total of more than $19 million.

Kemia is based in San Diego, California. The company's scientific team is led by the firm's Chief Scientific Officer, Ed Roberts, Ph.D., formerly Senior Vice President and head of Discovery Chemistry at F. Hoffmann La Roche in Basel, Switzerland. At Roche, Roberts had overall responsibility for drug discovery chemistry done in the vascular, metabolic and CNS therapeutic areas. Roberts joined Kemia in June of 2002 as the company's head "drug hunter" -- an entrepreneurial scientist with a rare ability to work and communicate across the multiple scientific and non-scientific disciplines that constitute the drug discovery processes. "Roberts has demonstrated both scientific leadership and pioneering efforts in integrated approaches to drug design," noted Shuster.

Roberts is joined on the scientific management team by Jan Lundstrom, Ph.D., Vice President of biology. Dr. Lundstrom joined Kemia in 2002 after completing a 27-year career at AstraZeneca, where his most recent position was Associate Director, Section of Pharmacokinetics/Pharmacodynamics, DMPK/BAC, Preclinical Development.

NOTE TO EDITORS: In the company name Kemia, Inc. noted in this news release, there is an accent over the "e" in "Kemia."

Also, in the name Jan Lundstrom, there is an umlaut over the "o" in "Lundstrom."

     Kemia, Inc.
     Lew Shuster, 858-964-1414
     or
     Gable-Cook-Schmid Public Relations
     Jon Schmid, 619-200-7257