Waters Corporation and Bruker NMR Announce Collaboration; Companies to Provide Drug Discovery Solutions to Life Scientists.

Business Editors and Health/Medical Writers

MILFORD, Mass.--(BW HealthWire)--March 13, 2000

Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT) and Bruker Instruments Inc. (Billerica, Mass.) have signed a technology access and distribution agreement, and have announced plans to bring Waters' advanced liquid chromatography instruments for drug discovery to Bruker's broad NMR customer base later this year. Under the terms of the agreement, Waters and Bruker will integrate their proprietary products and offer scientists new and powerful hyphenated instruments that bring greater integration and specificity to the drug discovery process. The agreement is the first between the companies and was announced today during a press conference at the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy in New Orleans.

Specifically, the agreement calls for Waters to give Bruker access to control codes for several of Waters products including Alliance(R) HPLC systems and its new CapLC(TM) Capillary Liquid Chromatography System. In turn, Bruker will couple these products to its industry-leading nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments and control instrument components within Bruker Hystar(TM) software. Bruker will take responsibility for selling and installing the new HPLC/NMR and capillary-scale HPLC/NMR products with assistance from Waters worldwide field support organization.

"The drug industry is targeting more research dollars at tools that allow them to qualify drug leads sooner in the discovery process. Companies can save tens of millions of dollars if they can separate the candidates likely to succeed in clinical trials from those less likely to do so," said Waters Corporation CEO, Douglas Berthiaume. "Scientists have been telling us how important it will be to create a faster more sensitive system that combines HPLC and NMR technologies. This tool will be invaluable for rapidly determining the structure of new drug candidates and their metabolites during early experimentation."

"Bruker is very pleased to begin a long-term collaboration with Waters which in late 2000 will enable pharmaceutical customers of Waters and Bruker to deploy integrated HPLC/NMR and HPLC/MS systems combining the best technologies of both companies," added Bruker's President, Frank H. Laukien.

Waters Corporation is a leading supplier of high performance liquid chromatography instrumentation and consumables, and mass spectrometry products for the Life Sciences market, which account for $3 billion in annual revenues of the $16 billion analytical instrument total.

Bruker NMR is the world leader in the design, manufacture, and distribution of enabling life science and drug discovery tools based on NMR. In recent years, Bruker NMR has pioneered HPLC/NMR technology and applications together with leading pharmaceutical and biotech customers. Bruker's AVANCE NMR spectrometer series is the world's preferred platform for LC/NMR.

Waters, Alliance and CapLC are trademarks of Waters Corporation. Bruker, Hystar, and Avance are trademarks of Bruker NMR.