CEVEC Pharmaceuticals ("CEVEC"), the developer of a novel human expression system derived from amniocytes, and Aragen Bioscience, Inc. ("Aragen Bioscience"), a California based contract research and development organization, announced today the signing of a strategic license agreement. This license enables Aragen Bioscience to offer its clients custom recombinant human cell lines expressing biotherapeutic proteins and antibodies as well as the transient and stable production of preclinical and clinical grade material.

The transient CAP-T ^TM protein production technology is based on CAP^® cells, an immortalized cell line for stable protein production developed by CEVEC. These non-tumor origin cell lines exhibit high protein expression, have been adapted to serum-free suspension culture and show post-translational modifications that are human-like, including authentic human glycosylation patterns.

The collaboration couples CEVEC's novel and proprietary CAP and CAP-T expression systems and cell lines with Aragen Bioscience's vast experience in cell line and process development to provide biotechnology and biopharmaceutical companies worldwide the opportunity to utilize Aragen's services to gain access to CEVEC's technology and quickly obtain high quality pre-clinical and clinical grade product generated from stable as well as transiently transfected cell lines.

"We are very proud to win Aragen as an experienced and trusted partner to offer our CAP Technology to a broader audience in the Biotechnology and Pharma sector" stated Wolfgang Kintzel, CCO of CEVEC. "Our human amniocyte derived cells offer significant advantages when it comes to complex protein production and we're excited that Aragen has chosen our technology as a valuable addition to their existing service offerings. The signing of this contract also underlines the growing recognition our technology is receiving in the Life Sciences arena."
 
Rick Srigley, CEO of Aragen Bioscience said: "We are very excited about the potential of CEVEC's CAP and CAP-T technology. We believe that human cells will be a superior production system for a variety of complex proteins. CEVEC's technology is a valuable addition to our existing expression portfolio and will enable our customers to pursue new directions for proteins that were difficult to express in the past or did not show satisfactory posttranslational modifications."

About CEVEC Pharmaceuticals GmbH - www.cevec-pharmaceuticals.com
CEVEC Pharmaceuticals GmbH, operational since 2004 was founded by a group of internationally renowned scientists and clinicians from the University of Cologne. Based on their experience and their longstanding collaborative work, they had perceived a lack of innovative expression systems for more efficient production of biologics such as recombinant proteins or gene therapy vectors. CEVEC's novel proprietary human CAP® and CAP-T^TM expression systems are ideal for manufacturing complex biopharmaceutical molecules with human glycosylation patterns.

About Aragen Bioscience, Inc. -  www.aragenbio.com
Aragen Bioscience, Inc. is a contract research and development organization in Morgan Hill, California. Aragen specializes in recombinant cell line and hybridoma development, cell culture and protein purification process development and protein production, primary and immortalized cell-based assays, in vivo models of human disease and custom immunological services.