Ceres Obtains Commercial License From Japan Tobacco

23-04-2004: Los Angeles. Ceres, Inc., a leading biotechnology company developing high value plants and plant-based products to benefit human health and agriculture has obtained a commercial license from Japan Tobacco Inc. for a proprietary transformation system known as PureIntro(TM). Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

"We are very pleased to have secured a license to PureIntro(TM) technology. This is an important tool for commercializing high-value plants and plant-based products," stated Richard Flavell, the Chief Scientific Officer of Ceres. He added, "Ceres has identified the biological roles of thousands of genes related to crop traits using its large collection of full-length cDNAs. Ceres is now moving rapidly to designing breakthrough traits. Having access to the PureIntro(TM) transformation technology will speed up our product development efforts in many economically valuable crops."