NEC

Press Contacts:

For immediate release

LifeSpan Biosciences and NEC Reach Milestones in Development of Cancer Diagnosis Support System

Seattle, May 20, 2005 - LifeSpan BioSciences, NEC Corporation and NEC Soft of Japan have reached significant milestones in their collaboration to develop a cancer diagnosis support system to meet the needs of pathologists, physicians and patients for rapid and accurate detection and diagnosis of disease.

The diagnostic assistant, based on jointly developed, proprietary image capture hardware and computer software, assists in the detection of cancer cells in pathology specimens and distinguishes them from non-cancerous cells. It is intended to assist pathologists by increasing their accuracy and productivity, and to provide information crucial for the clinical management of individual cancer patients. Through the partnership, LifeSpan, NEC, and NEC Soft plan to provide clinicians with a system that offers sophisticated image analysis and advanced diagnostic techniques.

“We are very pleased with the progress our partnership has made to date in developing this automated system, which is designed to offer sophisticated image analysis and advanced diagnostic techniques that improve the detection and diagnosis of cancers,” said Joseph Brown, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of LifeSpan Biosciences. “The cancer diagnosis support system will function as a stand-alone unit serving a single hospital and/or at a centralized core facility serving pathologists and clinicians regardless of their location.”

Two milestones have been reached in the collaboration. The first is the development of an enhanced version of LifeSpan's proprietary automated image capture system (ALIAS^TM), which can automatically capture high quality images from up to 300 pathology slides. The second is completion of improved software to accurately discriminate cancer cells from non-cancer cells based on their morphologic characteristics at high magnification. The milestones resulted in unspecified payments from NEC to LifeSpan.

Cancer, with its high prevalence and mortality rate, continues to rank among the world's deadliest and most costly diseases. Thanks to advances in the fields of genetics and molecular biology during the 20th century, we can look forward to continued progress in understanding the disease in its various forms as well as in prevention, detection, diagnosis, and clinical management of cancer to both improve the quality of life and extend the life of cancer patients. To achieve this, it will be necessary to obtain as much key information as possible from all sources, including tissue biopsy, and make efficient use of that information. The cancer diagnostic decision support system will help address those needs.

NEC Corporation is a global IT company with headquarters in Tokyo. NEC has an ongoing program in Bio-IT that draws on the technologies discovered and developed by its laboratories around the world. In this way, NEC aims to provide solutions and applications to enhance discovery and the delivery of more effective healthcare measures for everyone.

LifeSpan BioSciences, Inc. is a privately held molecular pathology service and development support company located in Seattle, Washington. LifeSpan, through its advanced imaging technologies, ALIAS^TM image capture system, and its expertise in pathology, provides key information used by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to select and advance promising therapeutic candidates through the drug development process.