Press Release

Cellectis S.A., the Alternext-listed innovative company,
receives a €1.4 million grant from OSEO Innovation (ANVAR).

Romainville, France - March the 30^th, 2007 - Cellectis S.A., a biotechnology company specializing in genome engineering and developing a new range of products for the custom rewriting of DNA sequences for the research, healthcare and industrial sectors, today announced that OSEO Innovation (France's national agency for industrial innovation, previously called ANVAR) has awarded the company an advance of 1.4 million euros over a 2-year period (to be reimbursed if the project is successful) for the development of meganuclease recombination systems (MRSs) for use in biomanufacturing.

OSEO Innovation funds innovative, technology-oriented projects with genuine potential for commercialization in France and abroad. As part of this mission, Cellectis - awarded "young innovative company" fiscal status by the French government, a member of the Medicen world-class competitiveness cluster and one of the world's leading companies in the high-potential genome engineering market - has been selected for funding.

Cellectis has developed and patented the MRS artificial DNA repair system (applicable to all types of living organisms), the use of which can be likened to DNA "copy-pasting". The company is the first to have developed this technology on the industrial scale - thus opening the way to rational genome engineering which seeks to accurately and reliably insert, modify, modulate and in vivo correct a gene in any living organism, without needing to introduce foreign genes which are often imprecisely inserted and poorly tolerated.

The OSEO Innovation funding covers a 2-year period and will be used to develop products for industrial cell engineering in drug manufacture and screening. One of the project's main goals is to develop, at least, one MRS for each of the benchmark cell families used in biomanufacturing, i.e. hamster, mouse and human lines.

At present, the Cellectis MRSs have a wide range of applications and are being sold worldwide to customers in three main sectors: human healthcare (genetic & viral diseases, therapeutics), agriculture (plant improvement) and biotechnology (raising productivity in recombination protein/biodrug production).

About Cellectis S.A.

Cellectis S.A. is a biotech company developing innovative, proprietary technologies for genome engineering: a new class of "molecular scissors" - Meganuclease™ enzymes - capable of recognizing, binding and cutting DNA with extremely high specificity. The company is developing and commercializing Meganuclease Recombination Systems (MRSs) which combine these molecular scissors with a DNA matrix for targeting and modifying a gene of interest in vivo (and without affecting the rest of the genome) via the action of the cell's natural maintenance and repair system. Cellectis now holds a portfolio of 8 MRSs in development, of which 5 have a therapeutic focus.
Cellectis is a spin-off from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, which has granted the company exclusive rights to 26 of the 27 granted patents and 38 of the 69 pending applications in its current portfolio, including one which will fall into the public domain in 2009, followed by 6 others in 2010. Before its IPO, Cellectis had already raised 17.5 million euros in two rounds (in 2000 and 2002/2005) to support its R&D and commercial development. The company's principal shareholders are AGF Private Equity, BankInvest Biomedical Venture, Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners, Kaminvest Holding and Odyssée Venture. To date, Cellectis has signed 45 collaboration agreements and alliances worldwide with pharma companies (including AstraZeneca, Merck & Co., Wyeth and Shire), agrochemical groups (including Bayer, DuPont and BASF) and biotech companies (including Genentech, Regeneron and Lexicon Genetics). Cellectis' corporate headquarters are located on the Biocitech biopark at Romainville near Paris. It currently has 40 staff, including 16 PhDs.
For more information on Cellectis, visit our web site: www.cellectis.com