Rehovot, Israel and Monheim am
Rhein, Germany
June 18, 2007
Evogene Ltd. (TASE: EVGN) and
Bayer CropScience
announced today a collaboration to increase the productivity and
yield of a Bayer CropScience core crop, especially with regard
to stress conditions such as drought. Under a recently signed
agreement, Bayer CropScience has exclusively licensed the rights
to certain genes discovered by Evogene which have demonstrated
improved plant yield and other performance enhancements in
various plant species. Evogene is to receive an initial fee,
success-based milestone payments and royalties on sales.
"It is Evogene’s goal to collaborate with the leading companies
worldwide in creating plant varieties with improved traits based
on our discoveries”, stated Mr. Ofer Haviv, Evogene's President
and CEO. “Therefore we are obviously delighted to begin this
collaboration with Bayer CropScience for the improvement of this
core crop.” Mr. Haviv concluded.
Dr. Michiel van Lookeren Campagne, Head of Research at
BioScience, a business operations unit of Bayer CropScience,
welcomes the new business relationship with Evogene. “Advantages
in yield and yield stability have been the basis for the fast
adoption of our superior hybrids. The integration of these
discovered genes into our R&D pipeline can allow us to offer
further benefits to our customers, especially with regard to
ensuring high yields in difficult climatic conditions.”
Evogene’s mission is to be a world leader in delivering
improved plant traits to the agro-biotechnology industry through
the use of a continuously improving proprietary platform
combining state-of-the-art computational genomics, molecular
biology and advanced breeding methods. Evogene’s current product
development portfolio includes such traits as: abiotic stress
tolerance and yield, enhancement of cotton fiber quality,
improving nitrogen use efficiency, increasing oil yield for the
BioDiesel industry and plant manufacturing of therapeutic
proteins. Until its spin-off as a separate company in 2002,
Evogene was the agro-biotechnology division of Compugen Ltd.
(Nasdaq: CGEN). Evogene’s core in-silico technology, the
ATHLETE, was based on Compugen’s proprietary LEADS computational
platform.
Bayer CropScience AG, a subsidiary of Bayer AG with annual sales
of about EUR 5.7 billion (2006), is one of the world’s leading
innovative crop science companies in the areas of crop
protection, non-agricultural pest control, seeds and plant
biotechnology. The company offers an outstanding range of
products and extensive service backup for modern, sustainable
agriculture and for non-agricultural applications. Bayer
CropScience has a global workforce of about 17,900 and is
represented in more than 120 countries.
More news
from Bayer
CropScience |
|