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ParAllele Press Release

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J. Clark Mason, PhD
Senior Director Product Marketing
Tel: ext. 7584

For ParAllele BioScience Inc.
Jennifer Larson
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ParAllele BioScience Collaborates with Both USC and Baylor on Large-Scale Association Studies of Lupus and Respiratory Pathogens

-- Immune-Inflammation panel enables the most comprehensive studies of autoimmune and infectious diseases --

South San Francisco, CA, April 27th, 2005 - ParAllele BioScience, Inc. today announced collaborations with the University of Southern California (USC) as well as the Baylor College of Medicine, to perform large-scale genetic association studies of autoimmune and infectious diseases respectively. These collaborations will utilize ParAllele's application-specific SNP genotyping panel that is being commercialized as part of an existing development partnership with Affymetrix, Inc. The new panel will cover about 8,000 SNPs from over 1,000 candidate genes related to the genetics of immunity and inflammation and is suitable for studies in multiple ethnic populations. For the first time researchers can use a single assay to conduct affordable, large-scale genetic studies in two important areas: identifying the genes responsible for autoimmune diseases such as lupus, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, and collecting information on individual susceptibility to infectious disease or patient response to immunization. The collaboration with USC focuses on discovering the genes associated with Lupus. The second collaboration, with Baylor, is one of the first to measure the genetic basis of patient response to the flu vaccine.

"We are enthusiastic about using ParAllele's Immune-Inflammation panel to discover genetic markers for childhood onset Lupus. Incorporating over 5 million genotypes, this will be the largest scale childhood onset Lupus trial of its kind," said Dr. Chaim Oscar Jacob, MD, PhD, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. Dr. Jacob is a leading expert in Lupus and has collected a large cohort of carefully annotated samples from patients affected by this disease, and their family members.

The MegAllele™ Immune-Inflammation panel will also enable a better understanding of why patients respond differently to treatment for infection by external pathogens. "We are pleased to extend our collaboration with ParAllele to study the genetic basis of the variability in a patient's immune response to vaccines. We are excited about combining the Immune-Inflammation panel with 1,500 of our custom SNPs to assay nearly 10,000 total SNPs. This will greatly increase the statistical power and gene coverage in our human respiratory pathogen (flu) study," said John W. Belmont, MD, PhD, Director of the Cardiovascular Clinic at Baylor College of Medicine.

Gene selection for this product was performed by scientists at ParAllele in collaboration with researchers at USC and Baylor. SNP selection in the candidate genes utilized both a HapMap-based tagging-SNP approach and amino-acid changing SNPs to maximize the informativeness of the panel.

The Immune-Inflammation Panel is available this quarter through ParAllele's genotyping services and as a MegAllele Human Immune-Inflammation Genotyping Kit, sold by Affymetrix. "Both (Services and Kits) can be cost-effectively combined with other standard or custom panels to target population-specific or disease-specific genes that are not already included in the off-the-shelf panel," said Clark Mason, PhD, Senior Director Product Marketing, ParAllele. The Kit was developed in partnership with Affymetrix to run on the, soon to be released, Affymetrix GCS 3000 MegAllele System.

About ParAllele Bioscience

ParAllele BioScience, Inc. is accelerating healthcare breakthroughs by providing comprehensive genetic discovery solutions to the life science research, pharmaceutical and diagnostic sectors. The company's products and services utilize a multiplexed approach that leverages novel biochemical processes rather than complex instrumentation to discover and analyze minute variations in the human genome. The understanding of how subtle genetic variations contribute to disease risk, prognosis and drug response will lead to new and more effective drugs, predictive diagnosis, and the ability to better tailor therapies to individual patients. Headquartered in South San Francisco, California, ParAllele BioScience was founded by a team of leading researchers from the Stanford Genome Technology Center and Uppsala University. The company's investors include Abingworth Management, Index Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Versant Ventures. For more information about ParAllele, please visit the company's website at: parallelebio.com.

ParAllele, MegAllele are trademarks of ParAllele BioScience, Inc.. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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