News & Press

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.”

About Evogene

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.
For additional information, please visit Evogene’s Website at www.evogene.com.

This press release contains "forward-looking statements." These statements include words like "may," "expects," "believes," “scheduled” and "intends," and describe opinions about future events. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Evogene Ltd. to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements

About Bayer CropScience

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.

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