June 26th, 2007
Rehovot, Israel and Gatersleben, Germany - June 26th, 2007 - 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.”
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 SunGene - a BASF Plant Science company
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.
Contact Information
Evogene: Sungene:
Ofer Haviv Jens Lerchl
President & CEO Managing Director
E-mail: ofer.haviv@evogene.com E-mail: jens.lerchl@sungene.de
Tel: +972-8-931-1905 Tel: +49-39482-7600
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