Maxygen announced today the signing of a five-year strategic research collaboration with Zeneca Agrochemicals. In exchange for specific worldwide research and commercialization rights, Maxygen will receive a $5.0 million equity investment together with more than $20.0 million in
research and development funding and licensing fees over the term of the collaboration. Success could earn Maxygen significant milestone payments in addition to royalties based on product sales.

"We are pleased to be working so closely with Zeneca in the development of important agriculture products," said Russell Howard, president and chief executive officer of Maxygen. "Zeneca's extensive experience in agriculture will be valuable in the rapid development of high-value products with benefits to the farmer, the food and feed industry and the consumer."

David Evans, Research and Development Director for Zeneca Agrochemicals said, "This broad collaborative research agreement is focused on the delivery of specific commercial products useful to the farmer for pest and disease control as well to others for quality, nutritional and productivity benefits."

Maxygen, Inc., headquartered in Redwood City, CA is a private biotechnology company that is focused on the application of technologies known as DNA Shuffling to provide value to a broad range of applications including human therapeutics, chemicals, vaccines, gene therapy, industrial enzymes, agriculture and nutraceuticals. The Company is the leader in nucleic acid recombination technologies for imparting new properties into single genes, multi-gene systems, pathways, vectors and genomes. In addition to this collaboration with Zeneca Agrochemicals, Maxygen has commercial relationships with several companies including Novo Nordisk in certain areas of industrial enzymes, Pioneer Hi-Bred for specific products in agriculture, and DSM Anti-Infectives for improved manufacturing of certain classes of penicillin antibiotics. Maxygen was founded in a March 1997 spinout from Glaxo Wellcome-Affymax, led by biotech entrepreneur Alejandro Zaffaroni, and DNA Shuffling inventor Pim Stemmer.

Company news release
N2054