PerkinElmer Partners with Cerep for Custom Drug Discovery Solutions

Supply and Co-Marketing Agreement Provides Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Customers with a Total Solution for Drug Candidate Detection and Validation

WALTHAM, Mass., Apr 06, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- PerkinElmer, Inc. (NYSE: PKI), a global leader in Health Sciences and Photonics, and Cerep SA (Eurolist: Cerep), a leading provider of drug candidate screening and profiling technologies, today announced the signing of a supply and co-marketing agreement to deliver custom drug discovery services. Under the terms of the agreement, PerkinElmer will exclusively market Cerep's target screening and profiling services to its customers, and the companies will jointly promote PerkinElmer's assay technologies and Cerep services to the drug discovery market.

"This agreement represents the latest step in our strategy to build the most comprehensive offering in biochemical and cellular screening for drug discovery," said Robert F. Friel, president and chief executive officer, PerkinElmer, Inc. "Our customers will benefit from direct access to Cerep's expertise in high throughput screening and profiling services, while PerkinElmer will be able to extend the reach of our leading assay technologies and assay development services into key drug discovery markets."

"Cerep is committed to providing the highest quality services in drug discovery and drug development and we are pleased to work with an established leader of drug discovery technologies to further strengthen our offerings," said Thierry Jean, chairman and chief executive officer, Cerep. "This agreement with PerkinElmer enables us to support our customers' complete drug discovery needs, from assay design to target screening and profiling, by adding a range of enabling assay technologies to our drug screening and profiling services."

This agreement provides PerkinElmer customers with an option to work with a single vendor throughout the entire drug discovery process. Cerep customers will now have access to several key assay development and detection platforms from PerkinElmer's Bio-discovery business, including AlphaScreen(R), AlphaLISA(TM), LANCE(R), and LANCE(R) Ultra(TM) for G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) and kinase assay development.

GPCRs and protein kinases represent a wide range of therapeutic targets in areas including cancer, central nervous system disorders, cardiac dysfunction and diabetes, making them among the most important areas of study in today's pharmaceutical and biotech laboratories.