Keene, NH, USA and Lelystad, the Netherlands  -  January 11, 2005.  Whatman® Schleicher & Schuell® and Pepscan Systems announce an agreement to distribute Pepscan's PepChip Kinase Substrate Array products and services. The Pepchip array is a high density peptide array containing unique addressable kinase substrates. The chip allows drug discovery scientists to profile over 80% of the human kinome. PepChip enables broad kinase activity screening in complex mixtures, substrate profiling of known and unknown kinases, and specificity testing of kinase inhibitors.

According to Dr. Robert Negm, Director, Business Development at Whatman Schleicher & Schuell, "The PepChip license will substantially improve the portfolio of microarray services and products we offer our pharma partners and customers. We feel confident that our move into the kinase inhibitor screening markets fits well in line with our corporate strategy to support pharmaceutical drug discovery programs."

"We are very excited about this agreement" says Dr. Jos Joore, VP Array Technologies of Pepscan, "it will allow many more customers to benefit from our products and services. Our pipeline of innovative peptide microarrays forms a perfect match for the strong focus on protein arrays at Whatman® Schleicher & Schuell®".

The PepChip Kinase Substrate array screens more than one thousand addressable peptide kinase substrates in one experiment. PepChip Kinase is a research tool to investigate the specificity of kinase inhibitors in the context of the total kinase activity of the target cells using cell lysates. The PepChip array offers proof of inhibitor specificity of kinases involved in signal transduction pathways and kinase substrate-dependent inhibition.

About Pepscan Systems
Pepscan Systems is a privately held Dutch company that has longstanding know-how in surface chemistry, peptide synthesis and coupling chemistry. Furthermore, it has proprietary technologies for spatial organization of peptide-based molecules to improve their biological functions (CLIPS™ technology, Chemically Linked Peptides on Scaffolds). The company uses its technology both in the development of a pipeline of therapeutic vaccines and in the development of a line of peptide micro-arrays. Pepscan is a spin-off from Wageningen University and employs 25 people. For more information visit www.pepscan.com.