Press Release

Cellectis SA and Celonic GmbH enter in collaboration and license agreement for mammalian cell lines engineering for bio-production purposes.

Romainville, France and Jülich, Germany - February the 21^st, 2006 - Cellectis, the rational genome engineering company, and Celonic GmbH, announced today that they entered into a collaboration agreement under which Celonic will develop with the Meganuclease Recombination System (MRS) technology of Cellectis, new generation of I-SceI meganuclease tagged host cell lines for biopharmaceuticals production.

Financial terms and conditions were not disclosed.

"This new agreement confirms the strategic importance of site directed insertion of transgenes into cells versus random integration for better gene expression purposes. In this agreement the meganuclease plays the central role for a robust generation of producer cell lines. Meganuclease technologies have been the "gold standard" of double-strand break induced homologous recombination in academic research for more than a decade and is now becoming central for contract manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals and therapeutic proteins developers that are looking for a robust control in the generation of stable producer cell lines." Said Isabelle Pelletier-Bressac, Vice President, Business Development of Cellectis. She also added "Cellectis is very pleased of this new agreement with Celonic which, we believe, will provide to the industry novel state-of-the-art production tools. Supported by strong internal results on meganuclease induced gene knock-in in mammalian cells, we are convinced that the expertise and skills of Celonic's scientists in tissue culture and cell engineering, and the development and use of tagged host cell lines suitable for pharmaceutical protein production will lead to a successful collaboration."

Cellectis (www.cellectis.com) was founded in 2000, as a spin-off from the Institut Pasteur. Today, Cellectis is the world leader in applying the technology of Meganuclease Recombination Systems to in vivo genome engineering and genome surgery. The company is focused on the research and development of custom-made Meganucleases for in vivo DNA interventions and also provides new tools for rational reverse genetics and targeted recombination. Cellectis develops Meganucleases that can induce unique site-directed double-strand breaks in a living cell, and can be used for biotechnological and therapeutical applications. The company is focusing on bringing "genome surgery" to clinic as a genuine new molecular medicine approach.

Celonic GmbH (www.celonic.de) is a global acting contract research and manufacturing organization with special emphasis (expertise) on the process development and GMP-compliant production of complex glycosylated, biopharmaceutical proteins in eukaryotic cell systems. The company, founded in 1998 as a spin-off of the Research Center Jülich, established a propriatory platform technology based on serum-free, tagged wildcard production host cell lines. The collaboration and licence agreement with Cellectis will further strengthen Celonics capabilities to develop high-yield production cell lines for biopharmaceuticals in shorter time, and thus, reduce time to market for its clients and its own biopharmaceutical compounds for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

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