Rehovot, Israel and Gatersleben,
Germany
June 26, 2007
Collaboration supported by
Israel-Germany BioDisc Program
Evogene Ltd. (TASE: EVGN)
and SunGene GmbH, a
BASF Plant Science
company, announced today their collaboration to develop next
generation enabling technologies for the precise bioengineering
of crops. The collaboration is supported under the
Israel-Germany BioDisc program by the Office of the Chief
Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology and
by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The
BioDisc program aims at intensifying contacts between the two
countries in areas such as future technologies with high
potential.
Currently, plant biotechnology provides methods for the
introduction of target genes by which a high number of plants
have to be analyzed. The goal of this collaboration is to enable
the introduction of target genes into plant DNA in a new way by
using integration sites that are especially suitable for the
insertion of new genes. This will further increase efficiency in
plant biotech research and development by reducing the number of
plants that have to be analyzed.
Biotech crops have had a tremendous impact on agriculture since
the first product launch in 1996. In 2006, the number of farmers
growing biotech crops exceeded 10 million and the annual area of
biotech crops grown exceeded 100 million hectares - more than
the surface area of France and Germany combined. Biotech seeds
are broadly adopted in soybean, corn, cotton and canola and
their sales were valued at over $6 billion and generated over
$60 billion worth of agricultural produce. With an unprecedented
60-fold increase during the first decade of adoption it is one
of the fastest adopted technologies in recent history.
Nevertheless, experts in the field expect that more precise
bioengineering methodologies would significantly increase the
adoption of bioengineered crops by providing the potential for
streamlining and simplifying the current processes.
Mr. Ofer Haviv, Evogene’s President and CEO, stated: “We are
pleased to enter a multi-year collaboration with SunGene, which
is dedicated to developing tools for precise engineering of
plant genomes. We anticipate that all our projects will benefit
from those tools. We are very excited about being able to work
with a world class organization in our field like BASF Plant
Science group.”
Dr. Jens Lerchl, SunGene's Managing Director, stated: “We are
looking forward to a fruitful cooperation with Evogene, an
organization known as being committed to develop improved
methodologies in plant biotechnology. We will create synergies
to both parties’ benefit by combining expertise of the companies
including BASF Plant Science which is BASF´s plant biotech
company.”
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.
SunGene is a daughter company of BASF Plant Science. In order to
take advantage of the possibilities of plant biotechnology,
BASF, the chemical company, founded BASF Plant Science in 1998
as its own biotechnology company. BASF Plant Science coordinates
a research and development platform in Europe and North America
with about 700 employees among which SunGene is focusing on
Metabolic Engineering of valuable plant compounds and Enabling
Technologies. BASF Plant Science is working to optimize crops
for the following sectors: more efficient agriculture, renewable
raw materials for specialty products and healthier nutrition for
humans and animals. These include, for example, plants with
improved agronomic characteristics, a higher content of vitamins
or omega-3 fatty acids for preventing cardiovascular diseases as
well as plants with a higher nutritional value for animals.
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