Lynx Therapeutics, Inc. announced today it has achieved a significant technical milestone that triggered a $5.0 million payment from E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Co. ("DuPont'').

The two companies have collaborated since October 1998, using a number of Lynx's technologies
to study and compare crop varieties with the aim of developing new varieties and new crop
protection products.

The technical milestone was the identification of over 520,000 cDNAs, by their signature
sequences, expressed in one sample using Lynx's Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing
(MPSS®) technology. These signature sequences identified approximately 56,000 genes, a
substantial number of which were absent from the public and DuPont's own databases.

Furthermore, the experiments provided the relative abundance of each expressed gene by simply
counting the number of times its signature sequence appeared amongst the 520,000 cDNAs
identified. The experiments were completed in under three weeks using only two of Lynx's current
set of over twenty proprietary instruments.

"Lynx's ability to discover novel gene sequences is unprecedented and provides us with
tremendous competitive advantage,'' said Dr. Scott Tingey, head of DuPont Genome Science.
"To attempt to extract the same information by any other means would be prohibitive in terms of
cost and time.''

"The milestone payment by DuPont, a company with recognized expertise in plant genomics,
provides further validation of the commercial applicability and value of Lynx's technologies,'' said
Dr. Norrie Russell, president and chief executive officer of Lynx.

"It is noteworthy to point out this work followed closely on the heels of another Lynx experiment,
which provided the signature sequences of over 3,000,000 cDNAs from two states of a human
cell line. Nearly 50,000 human genes were found to be expressed in that experiment. A significant number of these were not found in public databases and have been added to Lynx's list of novel gene signature sequences.''

Formed in 1992, Lynx has developed, and continues to develop, unique, proprietary processes
aimed at handling and analyzing, simultaneously, very large numbers of DNA molecules or
fragments in complex biological samples. At the core of these processes is Lynx's
Megaclone(TM) technology. This is a micro-bead technology that allows both the simultaneous
collection of millions of clones on as many micro-beads and subsequent simultaneous manipulation or analyses of these clones.

Applications include the physical extraction of genes (whether known or unknown) that are
differentially expressed between samples (Megasort(TM) technology), the characterization of gene expression within a sample by Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS®) technology, and a novel, highly efficient means for genotyping very large numbers of genetic markers, or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), simultaneously, against large populations of genomes (Megatype(TM) technology).

Company news release
N2329