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Cellectis SA extends its technology agreement with BASF Plant Science GmbH for marker genes excision in crops
Paris, France
February 25, 2004

Cellectis SA, a biotechnology company specialized in genome engineering, announced today that the company was expanding its current agreement with BASF Plant Science GmbH.

The agreement, covering the evaluation and use of Cellectis’ proprietary Meganuclease I-SceI for the deletion/excision of nucleotide sequences, such as marker genes, in plants for agricultural and nutritional applications has been extended to further crops of interest for BASF Plant Science GmbH.

Financial terms and conditions of the agreement were not disclosed.

"We are extremely pleased with this opportunity to expand the scope of our agreement with BASF Plant Science, which was previously announced in May 2003” says Mrs. Pelletier-Bressac, VP Business Development of Cellectis.

“The combination of BASF Plant Science’s expertise in the field of plant biotechnology with Cellectis’ expertise in the Meganuclease field represents a very advantageous partnership," she added. “The fact that the evaluation has so far been positive is very satisfying and demonstrates the potential industrial value of our technology as a new marker excision technology in plants”.

BASF is the world’s leading chemical company. In 2002, BASF had sales of about €32 billion and over 89,000 employees worldwide. All BASF activities involving plant biotechnology are incorporated in BASF Plant Science. BASF Plant Science coordinates an international research and technology platform with seven sites in four countries in Europe and North America and employs about 400 people.

Cellectis SA was founded in 1999, as a spin-off from the Institut Pasteur. It is the first company to apply the Meganuclease Recombination System approach to in vivo genome engineering. The company is developing Meganucleases that can target a unique DNA break in vivo, as a fundamentally enabling technology for commercial applications in human therapeutics, pharmaceutical discovery, agriculture, and industrial biotechnology. Cellectis has already entered into 20 deals for the use of its genome engineering technologies, covering a wide range of applications such as animal models, protein production or agricultural crops improvement.

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