About Exelixis Plant Sciences

Our subsidiary, Exelixis Plant Sciences (EPS), located in Portland, Oregon, is leveraging partnerships with leading agriculture companies to create commercial opportunities in the areas of crop protection and plant biotechnology.

EPS has been a leader in utilizing "plants as factories" to produce high-value compounds that are naturally produced in plants, including nutritional ingredients and colorants for use in the health and wellness sector and in food and cosmetics industries. In addition there are opportunities to utilize the plant's biological machinery to produce pharmaceuticals more simply and economically than by traditional production methods for synthetically and biologically produced drugs.

In the area of crop improvement, we are leveraging our expertise in target identification, high-throughput screening to develop crops with superior yield and improved nutritional profiles for food and feed.

The large markets and global need for safer and more effective agricultural products, combined with our expertise in higher plant systems, make the agriculture programs at Exelixis Plant Sciences a valuable contributor to the agriculture industry.

Collaboration with Dow AgroSciences

In September 2007, Dow AgroSciences LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company, and EPS signed a major research collaboration agreement which includes the purchase of selected assets by Dow AgroSciences' affiliate Agrigenetics Inc. The agreement is focused on the development of new tools for gene discovery and validation of novel crop traits. The asset purchase by Dow AgroSciences includes certain intellectual property and physical assets used for crop trait discovery.

In the rapidly advancing field of plant biotechnology, the capability to quickly identify and validate genes of interest in key crops is a competitive advantage. This contract research agreement and asset purchase combine the unique skills and technologies of both companies to deliver differentiated capabilities in gene discovery and validation.