Direvo Biotech AG Receives Broad European Patent Protection for its Protease Optimization Platform

COLOGNE, GERMANY--(Marketwire - June 24, 2008) - DIREVO Biotech AG, a world-wide leader in high throughput protein and strain engineering, announced today receipt of notice from the European Patent Office that the post-granting opposition period had ended without a filed opposition against Patent Grant No. EP 150411. This patent, entitled, "Process for Generating Sequence-Specific Proteases by Directed Evolution", broadly claims methods for the generation of proteases with novel, altered, or customized specificity. This further strengthens DIREVO's protease optimization platform, currently applied in two research and license agreements with Pfizer and AstraZeneca/MedImmune for the development of novel, specific proteases against multiple targets.