Redwood City, California
September 19,  2001

Maxygen, Inc. (Nasdaq: MAXY) has published a study demonstrating the power of its platform of recombination technologies to evolve a class of proteins with new activities that may address new market opportunities. The enzymes that Maxygen has created have a range of novel activities that have potential commercial applications in the pharmaceutical, chemical and agriculture markets.

Maxygen has previously reported numerous examples where its gene and protein optimization technologies have been used to increase desired activities of target proteins by factors of hundreds or thousands. Now, Maxygen has shown that its platform of integrated technologies can also create new protein activities, not present in the parental materials. These technologies have already been used to deliver success in partner and internal Maxygen development projects and Maxygen expects these and other proprietary approaches to lead to further success in product development.

Working with collaborators at the University of Minnesota, Maxygen scientists described in the September issue of Chemistry and Biology the creation of novel enzymes with specificities for triazine chemicals. Triazines are found in many biologically active molecules, and have a variety of commercial uses. This achievement results from a combination of Maxygen's highly effective gene and protein modification technologies for generating biological diversity, coupled with a high-throughput mass spectroscopy screening system.

"One key to this success was exploitation of the synergy between Maxygen's proprietary protein modification and screening technologies," said Russell J. Howard, CEO of Maxygen. "In contrast to other diversity generating technologies, Maxygen's proprietary technologies generate high quality genetic diversity with a large percentage of functional variants. This allows us to use an extremely precise screen such as mass spectroscopy to identify product candidates. Mass spectroscopy has traditionally been very accurate but slow. We have developed a high-throughput mass spectroscopy screening system. Unlike most other high-throughput screens, our mass spectroscopy screening allows rapid, precise identification and quantitation of individual compounds being produced by a cell or enzyme. We are broadly applying the techniques discussed in this paper across our human therapeutics and industrial businesses and have filed for patents on this set of technologies."

Maxygen, Inc. headquartered in Redwood City, California, is focused on creating novel products using its integrated proprietary technologies for human therapeutics and industrial applications. Maxygen's technologies bring together advances in molecular biology and protein modification to create novel biotechnology products. Maxygen has over 18 strategic collaborations with industry leaders and a pipeline of over 40 potential products, including eight in development.

Company news release
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