Hepregen Awarded Massachusetts Life Sciences Center 2011 Small Business Matching Grant

MEDFORD, MA--(Marketwire - May 26, 2011) -

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The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center announced yesterday that Hepregen Corporation, a leading provider of bioengineered solutions that increase success in drug development in order to improve patient safety, was awarded a $500,000 grant as part of the Small Business Matching Grants program established by the Life Sciences Act of 2008. The Center's program, launched in January 2010 as part of the state's ten-year, $1 billion Life Sciences Initiative, leverages federal small business grant funding that early-stage life sciences companies in the Commonwealth have received for their work in life sciences research and development, commercialization and manufacturing.

Hepregen's lead product HepatoPac™, launched in March 2011, is a microliver platform for use in clearance predictions, metabolite profiling, transporter studies, drug-drug interactions, and toxicity determination during the drug development process. The utility of HepatoPac in ADME/Tox applications is being validated and adopted by several leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. In an announcement earlier this year, Hepregen detailed the expansion of its collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim for the integration of HepatoPac into drug discovery and development programs.

"This grant is evidence of the biopharmaceutical industry's need for more predictive platforms to improve and transform drug development," Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bernadette C. (Bonnie) Fendrock commented. "The funding will have significant impact as we continue to gain traction in the marketplace as more companies adopt the HepatoPac platform and as we work towards securing our Series B financing. We thank the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center for this recognition and award."

About Hepregen Corporation
Hepregen's mission is to translate the value of its technology platform to improve the safety and efficacy of drugs in development with greater economic efficiency and significant impact on patients' lives. The company is focused on advancing and commercializing its microliver platform, HepatoPac™, into the drug-development pipeline of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Hepregen's platform technology offers the potential to deliver a breakthrough technology for toxicity screening and a new platform for drug discovery. It combines sophisticated biological and engineering technologies to create an in vitro liver model which closely mimics many key functions and features of the in vivo human liver.

Currently, Hepregen is partnered with over 20 pharmaceutical companies using the HepatoPac technology, including Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals,and Sanofi-aventis. In 2008, Battelle Ventures spun out Hepregen Corporation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and led the company's Series A financing. The company is currently raising its Series B financing.

For more information about Hepregen, please visit: http://www.hepregen.com/