Millennium Pharm, Caliper Extend LabChip Collaboration

Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Caliper Technologies Corp. (Mountain View, CA) have signed a collaborative agreement, under which they will jointly invest in and develop novel LabChip applications to enhance the productivity of genomics-based drug discovery and development. Millennium will also subscribe to Caliper's Technology Access Program (TAP), which provides Millennium with access to LabChip high-throughput screening technologies and products, along with technical support, assay development, and customization services.

Under the agreement, the companies will co-develop new LabChip applications designed to deliver productivity and capability enhancements to target validation, ligand identification, and platform-wide configuration of analytical assays utilizing cellular and biochemical approaches. By participating in TAP, Millennium will gain access to Caliper's existing LabChip technologies and products for high-throughput screening.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Caliper Technologies Corp. designs, manufactures, and commercializes LabChip devices and systems that enable experiments that ordinarily require laboratories full of equipment and people to be conducted on a chip small enough to fit in the palm of a child's hand. The chip contains a network of microscopic channels through which fluids and chemicals are moved in order to perform the experiment.

Millennium, a drug discovery and development company, employs large-scale genetics, genomics, high-throughput screening, and informatics in an integrated science and technology platform. This drug discovery platform is applied across the healthcare sector, from gene identification through patient management, to accelerate and transform the discovery and development of proprietary therapeutic and Diagnomics products and services.

For more information: Christopher Mirabelli, President, Pharmaceutical R&D, Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., 75 Sidney St., Cambridge, MA 02139. Tel: 617-679-7000. Fax: 617-374-9379.

Dan Kisner, President and CEO, Caliper Technologies Corp., 605 Fairchild Dr., Mountain View, CA 94043-2234. Tel: 650-623-0700. Fax: 650-623-0500.

Edited by Jim Pomager