KIRIN WILL FORM NEW RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT COLLABORATION WITH HYSEQ

Tokyo, Japan, August 17, 2001 - Kirin Brewery Co., Ltd. (President: Koichiro Aramaki) announced to sign a new research and development agreement with Hyseq, Inc. (President and CEO: Ted W. Love). In this collaboration, both companies will utilize respective proprietary technologies to obtain therapeutic proteins and antibodies in the fields including hematopoietic and inflammatory diseases. Kirin will support collaborative research work at Hyseq. Discoveries in the collaboration will be jointly owned by Kirin and Hyseq, and will be jointly developed and marketed with costs and efforts shared equally. Hyseq will have marketing rights in North America on all products discovered and developed under the collaboration. Kirin will have marketing right in Asia, New Zealand and Australia.

Hyseq is engaged in research and development of novel biopharmaceutical products from its collection of proprietary genes discovered using its high-throughput screening-by-hybridization platform. Kirin has conducted a collaborative research with Hyseq since 1998 in order to discover growth factors produced in a specific cell line owned by Kirin.

Under the new collaboration agreement, Kirin will be allowed to accelerate its promising research and development opportunities in the targeting fields of renal diseases, cancer and hematological diseases, and immunological and allergy-related diseases from combination of Hyseq's database including growth factors and receptors, and Kirin's gene validation and protein technology.

Certain statements in this press release consist of forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, uncertainties regarding the development of new technology and new clinical products. Actual results, events or performance may differ materially.

Click here to return to the news page.