ACCELRYS ANNOUNCES TOPKAT UPDATE FOR HIGH THROUGHPUT TOXICITY PROFILING

12-21-2001: Accelrys Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Pharmacopeia, Inc. (NASDAQ: PCOP), today announced the release of TOPKAT BATCH and Version 6.1 of TOPKAT, a leading program for the in silico estimation of toxicological properties of small molecules destined for use as therapeutics, agrochemical agents, or cosmetic additives.

TOPKAT BATCH represents a major enhancement to TOPKAT?s toxicity estimation capabilities by allowing the automatic processing of large numbers of compounds. Users can now profile up to 1000 compounds with any number of licensed TOPKAT models. This will vastly increase the scope of use for TOPKAT in high throughput screening projects supporting decisions on the selection of compound collection/libraries for experimental testing.

In addition, several enhancements were added to TOPKAT 6.1 in response to requests and feedback from existing customers. TOPKAT 6.1 provides three new models for assessing a human therapeutic for potential toxicity: Rabbit Skin Irritancy, Rat Inhalation LC50, and Rat Maximum Tolerated Dose. These models extend the existing twelve TOPKAT models to form the widest range of validated and relevant toxicity estimation tools available today.

"Over the years TOPKAT has proven itself in the world's pharmaceutical and chemicals industries as an invaluable tool for estimating a broad range of toxicities for prospective product candidates," says Dr. Scott Kahn, Senior VP, Life Sciences at Accelrys. "More recently, TOPKAT is helping to guide experimental toxicology efforts by identifying structural features that may be associated with predicted toxicities. Accelrys' investment in TOPKAT BATCH and the new toxicity models ensures that TOPKAT will remain an essential tool for anyone seeking to streamline their discovery process by concentrating on the candidate molecules most likely to succeed."