Caliper Discovery Alliances and Services receives a $1.8M funding commitment for the EPA's ToxCast program

Caliper Life Sciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: CALP), a leading provider of tools and services for drug discovery and life sciences research, today announced that its Caliper Discovery Alliances and Services (CDAS) unit has been awarded a new funding commitment for $1.8 million under its contract with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the EPA's ToxCast screening program. This new task order increases the cumulative funding Caliper has been awarded under the ToxCast program to $5.6 million.

"We are pleased to receive this new order from the EPA, which we believe further validates Caliper's capabilities and performance in the area of predictive toxicology screening assays. This new task order confirms Caliper's future role in the EPA's ToxCast program, and supports our belief that our funded activities will continue to expand as work starts on the new set of compounds in the coming year. We believe this task order will help fuel strong double-digit growth by our CDAS business in 2010 to complement our continuing strong imaging and microfluidic growth outlook," commented Kevin Hrusovsky, President and CEO of Caliper.

Caliper has been working with EPA on its ToxCast program since 2007. The initial goal of the ToxCast program is to create a database of in vitro (laboratory) assay data on a broad set of compounds for which in vivo (animal) safety data already exists. The long term goal of ToxCast is to identify in vitro assays that can predict toxicity in humans and animals and then employ those predictive tests to supplement or replace existing animal-based tests, thus reducing the cost and improving the speed of regulatory approval of new environmental chemicals.

"This most recent task order represents Caliper's advancement into Phase II of testing under the EPA's ToxCast program, which is expected to cover the screening of approximately 700 environmental compounds, in contrast to Phase I which covered approximately 320 compounds. The task order we just received involves screening this new compound set against a panel of 81 G-Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) assays, which is a subset of Caliper's current ToxCast assay panel of 275 assays in total. The EPA expanded Caliper's original Phase I ToxCast panel of 235 assays in the third quarter with the addition of 40 new kinase and other enzyme assays. All of these new assays are performed on Caliper's LabChip EZ Reader® instrument, which reflects the high quality of data obtained with our LabChip systems," commented David Manyak, Executive Vice President, Drug Discovery Services.