Agilent Technologies and Strand Life Sciences Announce GeneSpring Development Agreement

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced an agreement in which Strand Life Sciences will develop Agilent’s GeneSpring software. This move is designed to accelerate upgrades as Agilent aggressively addresses evolving customer needs. This agreement expands on an existing relationship between Stratagene Corp. and Strand. Stratagene was acquired by Agilent in June 2007.

“We are excited about this new partnership with Strand Life Sciences,” said Bruce von Herrmann, general manager and vice president of Agilent’s Software and Informatics Division. “Their expertise in delivering chemistry and biology software will accelerate our bioinformatics software development and move us toward our number-one goal of providing application and workflow solutions for customers.”

“Agilent is an ideal partner for us as we build out applications for systems biology and, more broadly, in drug discovery,” said Vijay Chandru, Ph.D., chairman and CEO of Strand Life Sciences. “Our proven Avadis platform will power the market-leading GeneSpring products and enable rapid development of new functionality and analysis capabilities. This relationship will give customers more reasons to choose GeneSpring as their data analysis solution.”

The first version of GeneSpring GX developed by Strand Life Sciences is scheduled for release in late 2007. Customers of Stratagene’s ArrayAssist software will be offered a migration path to this new version of GeneSpring. More information will be available at the Agilent Bioinformatics Conference, Sept. 27-28, in Berlin, Germany: agilent.com/chem/bioinformatics-berlin2007.