Almirall enters into long term compound library agreement with Evotec

Value exceeding EUR 2.5 million over the two-year contract period

Barcelona, 21 July 2005.- Almirall is announcing a collaboration agreement with Evotec over two years for the synthesis of compound libraries which will help Almirall to discover new drugs. In this way, Almirall can maintain its main aim of preserving the well-being and health of people by offering society innovative drugs which improve health and quality of life.

Applying leading skills in high-speed parallel synthesis, medicinal and computational chemistry, Evotec will design and synthesise - thousands of drug-like compounds with potential pharmacological activity across a wide range of diverse chemical scaffolds. With Evotec’s state-of-the-art integrated autopurification and analytical platforms each compound will be of the highest purity to deliver high quality results in Almirall’s pharmaceutical screening and medicinal chemistry programmes.

“In the process of selecting the right partner for our ambitious library project, we were impressed by Evotec’s reputation and the company’s impressive track record in designing and delivering diverse and focused compound libraries,” said Dr José Mª Palacios, General Director for Research & Development at Almirall.

“We are very satisfied with this agreement and we are convinced that with our own templates and related structural series as well as innovative methods, we will be able to develop in a short time drug-like compounds which will help our partner to discover new drugs”, said Dr. Mark Ashton, Executive Vice President Business Development Services at Evotec.

Evotec is a leader in the discovery and development of the next generation of novel small molecule drugs. With its many years of experience with parallel synthesis technologies, Evotec has synthesised and delivered more than one million different compounds to date.

Evotec has a staff of over 600 employees with operations primarily in Hamburg (Germany) and near Oxford (United Kingdom).

More information on Evotec is available at www.evotecoai.com

About Almirall

Almirall, a leading company committed to health, is a consolidated international pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops and commercialises drugs from its own R&D, as well as licensed drugs, with the aim of improving health and quality of life.

Almirall focuses its drug discovery resources in therapeutic areas related to the treatment of asthma, COPD, psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.

Almirall will be investing 500 million Euros in R&D over the next five years. This is the largest investment in this area by a Spanish pharmaceutical company. Forecasts for total sales in 2005 amount to 946 million Euros.

Almirall, whose headquarters are in Barcelona (Spain), has a staff of over 3,200 people, approximately 500 of whom form part of the R&D team. Almirall currently has a presence in more than 100 countries with its own products and products licensed from other prestigious companies.The company is strengthening its direct presence in Europe and Latin America via affiliates.