—Funding from Navigator Technology Ventures, Genentech, Sachem Ventures Will Advance Introduction of Powerful New Proteomic-Based Tissue Analysis Products to Drug Researchers & Diagnostic Pathologists—
—Company Releasing First Systems—

NEW HAVEN, Conn., September 14, 2004— HistoRx, Inc., a bioscience company focused on the development of new in situ digital diagnostic technologies, announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in a Series A financing. Proceeds from the financing will be used to initiate commercialization of a proprietary new molecular-based imaging technology developed at Yale University for tissue and tissue microarrays called AQUA™ (Automated Quantitative Analysis), which enables researchers to identify relationships between protein expression and therapeutic response that were previously undetectable using conventional methods of pathology analysis. HistoRx has exclusively licensed the AQUA™ technology that was developed by two of the company’s founders, David Rimm, M.D., Ph.D. and Robert Camp, M.D., Ph.D., both of the Yale University School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology. In addition, the company holds exclusive license to a series of patient cohort databases from Yale’s tissue archive containing 20- to 40-year clinical followup information corresponding to different types of human cancer. The Yale School of Medicine’s extensive archive holds more than three million tissue samples collected over the past 70 years.

Navigator Technology Ventures, the venture arm of Draper Laboratory, Inc., served as lead investor for the financing. Other participating investors include Genentech, Inc., Sachem Ventures, LLC, and Marnat Investments.

“We founded HistoRx on the firm belief that the extraordinary power of AQUA™, coupled with the extremely valuable long-term clinical followup data associated with the Yale tissue archive, provides a groundbreaking new tool for drug research and development,” said Robert A. Curtis, President & CEO of HistoRx and a co-founder of the company. “Having secured initial funding, we are positioned to successfully leverage this compelling technology and the collective knowledge of our scientific founders to substantially improve tissue analysis for both pharmaceutical R&D and patient care.”

“In contrast to the morphology-based approach of current tissue imaging technologies, HistoRx’s platform pivots on the measurement of protein expression in user-defined subcellular compartments,” said Dr. Rimm.

“Our automated technology is the only method capable of localizing and quantifying proteins in tissue while maintaining their spatial relationships, which vastly increases the quality and amount of information for analysis.” Initially, HistoRx is providing contract services to academic institutions as well as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies while selectively licensing its technologies to leading academic and commercial pharmaceutical research laboratories.

“We recently entered into feasibility studies with two major pharmaceutical companies, and we are scheduled to ship our first systems to two preeminent research universities this week,” said Dr. Curtis.

“HistoRx’s technology is not only novel and state-of-the-art, but it has the potential to significantly reduce the risk of clinical trial failure and move new drug candidates through the development process more quickly,” said Rana Gupta, a Partner at Navigator. “Like many new technology companies, HistoRx is using a multistage business model designed to bring the company rapidly to profitability by immediately offering its imaging platform on a contract service basis, while simultaneously licensing the platform to select academic and commercial drug discovery companies as the company pursues its own R&D programs in high-value diagnostic reagents.”

ABOUT THE HISTORX TECHNOLOGY
HistoRx holds exclusive license to the automated AQUA™ technology, which enables high-throughput, objective, and precise analysis of individual tissue samples and tissue microarrays. The keystone of this technology is its ability to accurately measure the location and quantity of critical proteins within the subcompartments of cells in a tissue sample while maintaining the relative spatial relationships of proteins. In addition, the company’s exclusive access to databases in microarray format based on Yale’s extensive tissue archive enables simultaneous examination of thousands of patients with multiple types of cancer and other diseases. The integrated HistoRx platform has a number of applications, including improved identification and validation of targets for drug discovery and development as well as animal model validation. Most significant, HistoRx expects its technologies to enable preselection of patients that will be most likely to respond to a specific therapy, a development that is expected to significantly reduce the number of patients necessary for a clinical trial and vastly improve therapeutic success.