Evolva to receive second milestone payment from Roche

Reinach, Switzerland, 8 December 2011 – Evolva Holding SA (SIX: EVE) today announced that Roche (SIX: ROG, RO; OTCQX: RHHBY) has confirmed that Evolva has achieved the second milestone in their collaboration.

During the collaboration Evolva has created numerous novel compounds with drug-like properties. Some of these compound show promising activity against a range of viruses, others against protein:protein interactions relevant for oncology. Selected early leads have now reached a stage where Roche will take over responsibility of their further evaluation.

Accordingly, Roche will make a milestone payment (of an undisclosed amount) to Evolva. The milestone payment does not change Evolva’s cash flow guidance for 2011.

Neil Goldsmith, CEO of Evolva, said “This is an important achievement, not only for our team but for the synthetic biology field in general. Synthetic biology is mainly known for its ability to create new production routes for known molecules. Now we have shown that it can be used to create diverse, novel compounds that combine both attractive drug-like characteristics (f.x. adherence to Lipinsky’s “rule of five”) and promising activity in relevant cellular assays. This opens up a new and promising field of chemistry for the pharmaceutical industry.”

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About the Roche discovery collaboration

The programme was initiated in January 2010 and focuses on creating compounds with activity on targets in oncology and infectious disease using Evolva’s technology platform. Roche has paid Evolva an up-front technology access fee and is paying research fees during the project. Roche will have responsibility to take forward any compounds discovered during the collaboration and will potentially pay Evolva research and clinical milestone fees as well as royalties on any products that result from the collaboration. Evolva will have the first right to any compounds not taken forward, or subsequently deprioritised by Roche.

About Evolva Holding SA

Evolva strives to improve people’s lives by applying its technology and other resources to the discovery and development of new products and processes that benefit the health, well-being and financial economy of patients, consumers and partner companies around the world. Evolva uses biosynthetic and evolutionary technologies to create and optimise small molecule compounds and their production routes. Our approach differs from that of the mainstream in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. We are active in pharmaceutical development (infectious disease and complications of diabetes) as well as in consumer healthcare and nutrition (food ingredients, personal care and crop protection). We have partnered projects as well as proprietary programmes ongoing. More information: www.evolva.com.

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