Lynx Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: LYNX) and Aventis CropScience GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany, announced today that they have agreed to jointly develop and commercialize a novel assay based on Lynx's proprietary bead-based technologies. This decision has led to a five-year extension of the original March 1999 agreement between the companies that provides Aventis CropScience with access to Lynx's genomics discovery services.

Lynx and Aventis CropScience will own the assay technology jointly. Lynx will manufacture and sell the services or products based on the assay technology, and will pay related royalties to Aventis CropScience. Additionally, Lynx will derive revenues from performing genomics discovery services for Aventis CropScience during the development and commercialization phase of the agreement.

"We believe that initial results suggest that the use of our quantitative technologies will provide an excellent method for the development of effective assays for use in crops," said Norrie Russell, Ph. D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Lynx. "We are excited about the extension of our agreement with Aventis CropScience, and we look forward to the commercialization of the assays."

"We believe that teaming up with Lynx has resulted in the highly creative thinking of scientists with very complementary skills," said Dr. Bernard Convent, Head of R&D BioScience. "We are extremely impressed with the joint initiative that may lead to a novel standard in the industry."

Lynx is a leader in the development and application of novel technologies for the discovery of gene expression patterns and genomic variations important to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agricultural industries. These technologies are based on the Megaclone(TM) technology, Lynx's unique and proprietary cloning procedure, which transforms a sample containing millions of DNA molecules into one made up of millions of micro-beads, each of which carries approximately 100,000 copies of one of the DNA molecules in the sample. Megaclone(TM) technology is the foundation for Lynx's analytical applications, including: Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing, or MPSS(TM), technology, which provides gene sequence information and high-resolution gene expression data; Megasort(TM) technology, which provides differentially expressed gene sets; and Megatype(TM) technology, which provides single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, disease- or trait-association information. Lynx is also developing a proteomics technology, Protein ProFiler(TM), which is expected to provide high-resolution analysis of complex mixtures of proteins from cells or tissues.