MediQuest Therapeutics Purchases Assets of Taktix

(Seattle, WA - July 14, 2003) MediQuest Therapeutics, Inc., a drug discovery company targeting inflammatory diseases, announced today that, it had purchased the assets of Taktix, Inc., a pioneer drug discovery company addressing chronic pain and the problems associated with current anesthetics. The transaction exchanged MediQuest stock for the Taktix compound library, intellectual property, and physical assets.

Taktix was founded in 1999 by Dr. Kenneth Drasner of UCSF to develop a safer anesthetic for spinal and epidural anesthesia. Since its founding, Taktix established high-throughput assays, animal models for spinal anesthesia and functional toxicity, and a compound library of small molecules based on potent interactions with sodium channel sites. The compound library generation was guided, in part, by Dr. George Kenyon, Dean and Tom D. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy and Dr. Gregory Petsko, Lucille P. Markey Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Brandeis University, both of whom are long-standing members of MediQuest's Scientific Advisory Board.

Frederick J. Dechow, MediQuest's President and CEO, said, "This is an important expansion of the MediQuest compound library and a pivotal advance in our capabilities for developing drug candidates to treat diseases of the central nervous system. The Taktix compounds have a chemical framework that complements the peptidomimetic-polyamine-pharmacophore basis of MediQuest current library. In addition, we will be gaining a new point of intervention, the Na channel, to complement our current modulators of N-methyl-D aspartate (NMDA) for treating CNS disorders."