LION bioscience and BIOBASE Announce Strategic Partnership.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. & HEIDELBERG, WOLFENBUETTEL, Germany -- --Companies To Combine Product Strengths to Address Network Analysis

LION bioscience and BIOBASE, a leading content provider in the field of gene regulation, today announced that they have entered into a collaboration aimed at integrating BIOBASE's high quality network content into LION's software products. Once completed, scientists will be able to access network and cellular pathway information from LION's SRS technology. This consolidation will allow research organizations to optimize their R&D efforts, specifically in the target identification and validation areas.

LION will make the BIOBASE network information accessible in SRS through web interfaces and specialized data viewers. By associating the BIOBASE content with extensive bio-data - as offered by the integration capabilities of SRS - scientists will be able to view networks and cellular pathways in a larger biomedical context.

"We are very pleased to collaborate with BIOBASE, a well known provider of pathway information", said Dr. Thure Etzold, Chief Executive Officer of LION bioscience. "Cellular pathway and network information is an important component to biomedical R&D. By taking advantage of the synergies between BIOBASE's content and LION's software products, scientists will be able to easily retrieve relevant, high quality data, in less time."

"LION bioscience is an important provider of software products for target identification and validation, and working together with them in making our content available to a larger user community is an exciting opportunity", said Prof. Edgar Wingender, President and CSO at BIOBASE. "The research community will benefit from the combination of our complementary technologies."

For further information please contact:

LION bioscience AG: Tracy Coffey Director Global Communications [phone] [e-mail]

BIOBASE GmbH: Susanne Thiele Sales and Marketing [phone] [e-mail]

About BIOBASE

BIOBASE, based in Wolfenbuettel/Lower Saxony, Germany, and Beverly, MA, USA, develops databases and software tools. BIOBASE is a private company and was founded in 1997 from the bioinformatics research group of the German Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF). The company successfully distributes worldwide licenses for in-house developed molecular biological databases and is also active as a distributor for in-licensed databases. BIOBASE's product portfolio includes TRANSFAC(R), TRANSPATH(R) and BRENDA(R), internationally acclaimed, manually curated molecular biological databases for industrial and academic applications. The recent acquisition of the Proteome BKL databases from Incyte Corp. significantly expanded BIOBASE's product line. So far, over 70 of the larger biotechnological and pharmaceutical companies and over 350 universities and academic institutes are satisfied customers of the company. For more information on BIOBASE, please visit http://www.biobase.de.

About LION bioscience

LION bioscience (ISIN: DE0005043509, Reuters: LIOG, Bloomberg: LIO) provides proven information and knowledge management solutions to significantly improve life science R&D performance and productivity. Since it was founded in 1997, the company has become a recognized leader in the area of bioinformatics. LION has operations worldwide in Heidelberg, Germany, Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, MA, USA. LION's products are distributed by CTC Laboratory Systems in Japan and DigiGenomics in Taiwan. LION's (http://www.lionbioscience.com) solutions are used by more than 27,000 researchers at 300 academic and industrial customers globally.

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters set forth in this press release are forward looking within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and other applicable U.S. and German laws. These forward-looking statements may include projections, assumptions, estimates, targets, and descriptions of future events. Such statements are based on currently available information and on LION's current expectations as to future events that may not prove to be accurate. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Many factors could cause the actual results, performance or achievements of LION to be materially different from those that may be projected, expected, targeted, expressed or implied by such statements. All roll-out plans and future dates with respect to completion of development and market release of LION products are target dates only based on the company's current planning and may change in the future. Any delays in the current product release schedule will have a materially adverse effect on the company's targets for fiscal

year. We refer you to LION's Annual Reports on Form 20-F, as recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on September 30, 2004 , in which these and other risk factors are discussed. In the event of any material conflicts between the two documents, Form 20-F should be relied on. LION expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates, revisions or corrections to any forward-looking statements or historical information contained in this announcement, whether as a result of new information, change of assumptions or business model, future developments or otherwise.