CHIRAL TECHNOLOGIES, INC., Announces Exclusive Licensing Agreement for Chiral Chromatography Columns Invented in Austria.

WEST CHESTER, Pa. -- CHIRAL TECHNOLOGIES, INC., a wholly owned subsidiary of Daicel Chemical Industries, Ltd., of Japan, announced today, coincident with the start of the HPLC 2005 international conference on chromatography, that it has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for chiral chromatography columns invented in the laboratory of Professor Wolfgang Lindner of the University of Vienna.

The tradenames for this new series of chiral columns will be CHIRALPAK(R) QD-AX and CHIRALPAK(R) QN-AX. The chiral selectors for these columns are based on complementary quinine (QN) and quinidine (QD) derivatives. Dr. Rodger Stringham, Director of Technology at CHIRAL TECHNOLOGIES, INC., described the columns as follows, "these derivatives possess a tertiary amine in a binding cleft along with additional hydrogen bonding sites, allowing very strong interactions with chiral acids. The combination of strong interactions and the steric hindrance of the binding site cleft allows for high resolution separations of molecules containing carboxylic, phosphonic, phosphoric or sulfonic acid groups. Most separations are accomplished in the polar organic and reversed phase modes. In addition, the columns show high loading capacity for preparative applications."

On a global basis, the Daicel Group will become the worldwide source for the chromatography products derived from the invention. CHIRAL TECHNOLOGIES, INC., will be responsible for the products in North and South America, with Chiral Technologies Europe, S.A.S., serving as the source for the products in Europe, and Daicel's operating unit, the CPI Co., serving as the source in Japan, the rest of Asia and Australia.

The invention of this new class of chiral chromatography selectors was made by Professor Lindner and his senior researchers, Dr. Michael Lammerhofer and Dr. Norbert M. Maier. The initial development and application research for these columns was carried out by the team in the Lindner laboratory. Their work led to chemical bonding of the chiral selectors to silica gel, and they demonstrated that separations can be carried out with all common HPLC solvents.

These new chiral columns offer complimentary performance to the company's well established CHIRALPAK(R) and CHIRALCEL(R) polysaccharide columns invented by Professor Yoshio Okamoto of the University of Nagoya and developed by Daicel. The polysaccharide-based columns are recognized worldwide as the most widely used phases for chiral HPLC separations due to their broad range of application and their outstanding loading capacity.

In addition to supplying chiral chromatography columns and bulk chiral stationary phases, CHIRAL TECHNOLOGIES, INC., operates an outsourcing center for separation of chiral compounds from the gram to 50 Kg scale at its technical center in West Chester, PA. This state-of-the-art facility utilizes a wide range of chromatography equipment, including SMB systems (also known as multi-column chromatography (MCC)), supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) equipment, and traditional single column preparative HPLC systems.