Cambridge, Massachussett and Heidelberg, Germany
September 19, 2002

LION bioscience AG (Neuer Markt: LIO, WKN 504 350, Nasdaq: LEON), a leading provider of integrated IT solutions for the life science industry, today announced it signed two licensing agreements with Biogemma, a French crop science company, and RhoBio, a joint venture between Bayer Crop Science and Biogemma, for its SRS and bioSCOUT(R) technology, aimed at improving plant disease research.

The deals mark LION's entry into the large French crop science market and underline the versatility of LION's technology for pharmaceutical, agricultural and food science research. France has one of the largest life science markets in the world and offers significant growth potential for LION's comprehensive discovery solutions.

RhoBio will deploy LION's SRS technology for better integration of genetic data related to plant disease research in order to develop more effective crop treatments. SRS is the world's leading integration platform for biological data and seamlessly integrates information from hundreds of publicly available databases with in-house research data. LION recently presented LION DiscoveryCenter(TM), which combines SRS with the DiscoveryCenter(TM) technology acquired from NetGenics to form an even more powerful and robust integration platform that fulfills the industry need for combining biology and chemistry data of any format. LION DiscoveryCenter(TM) is designed to provide a collaborative decision platform from which all discovery activities can be managed in order to increase research productivity and creativity.

In addition, Biogemma will be using LION's bioSCOUT(R) application to more quickly and accurately analyze thousands of gene sequences to develop better crop protection strategies. The bioSCOUT(R) functionality will be part of LION's new Lead Engine(TM), a comprehensive biology solution that can be tailored to a company's particular research needs. LION's comprehensive solution approach to data integration allows companies to seamlessly link proprietary and third-party applications. Solutions built on the LION DiscoveryCenter (TM) technology integrate life science data, applications and decision support tools in a user-friendly desktop interface and form a scalable discovery decision platform.

"The power and flexibility of LION's integration and genome annotation technologies will allow us to develop new analysis procedures. We can also sort more quickly and accurately through increasingly large volumes of genomic data to find the appropriate information we need for our research," said Evelyne James, head of RhoBio's bioinformatics service, and Denis Scala, who is in charge of bioinformatics in Evry for Biogemma.

"We are delighted to sign on our first customers in France's important crop science market," said LION bioscience Vice President Global Sales Jason Theodosiou. "These agreements illustrate the broad utility of LION's integration solutions across the entire spectrum of the life sciences industry. Crop
science companies such as Biogemma and Rhobio are faced with similar challenges as pharmaceutical companies in unlocking the secrets of molecular data for developing successful products faster. For that they need life science informatics solutions that help them analyze complex gene-based data. LION's solutions build and present cogent representations of relationships between data, which improve the quality of research. Users gain context-sensitive information, so the right decisions can be made more quickly."

About RhoBio and Biogemma

RhoBio, a French joint venture between Bayer Crop Science (formerly Rhone-Poulenc Agro, then Aventis CropScience) and Biogemma, is one of Europe's leading plant biotechnology companies. Its research activities focus essentially on plant genomics for the model species, Arabidopsis and the crop species such as maize, wheat, rice and oilseed rape in order to identify new genes and their function.

Biogemma is a European company specialized in plant biotechnology research, created by French farmers. Biogemma regroups specialists of plant breeding and organizations sustaining downstream agro-industrial activities: the cooperative groups Limagrain, Euralis and RAGT, and the Sofiproteol and Unigrains corporations. Biogemma employs more than 100 researchers specialized in plant transformation, molecular and cellular biology, genomics, bioinformatics, molecular markers, plant physiology and pathology. From maize to wheat and from oilseed rape to sunflower, Biogemma describes, explores and improves the genetic diversity of the most important field crops cultivated in Europe. This research opens progressively new perspectives for the creation of varieties that answer new challenges in agriculture: preservation of  water resources, improvement of the food quality and security, use of fewer chemicals.

About LION bioscience AG

LION bioscience provides proven information and knowledge management solutions to significantly improve life science R&D performance and productivity. These solutions integrate all R&D disciplines, spanning from genomics to early and late discovery through clinical trials. LION applies these solutions for its internal drug discovery program in the field of nuclear receptors with the goal to improve the overall productivity of the drug discovery process, outlicense validated target-lead combinations and partner with pharmaceutical companies on a comprehensive integration platform.

Founded in 1997, LION has more than 500 employees, with headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany, and subsidiaries in Cambridge, UK, Cambridge, MA, Cleveland, OH, Columbus, OH, and San Diego, CA, USA. To date, LION has established partnerships with leading life science companies, including Aventis, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Celera, DuPont, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Janssen, Merck Inc., Nestle, Novartis, Paradigm Genetics, Pharmacia & Upjohn, Roche, Schering AG and Sumitomo Pharmaceuticals.