Announcement no. 10

BioPorto launches Rat NGAL ELISA Kit of its own production

BioPorto has launched a new ELISA test for the determination of the acute kidney injury marker NGAL in rats. The new Rat NGAL ELISA Kit is the first to be completely produced in BioPorto’s own facilities.

Acute kidney injury is a complication that may arise in serious illnesses or after risky medical or surgical interventions. This complication may affect about 5% of all hospitalized patients in the western world and entails at least a doubling of mortality. There is currently no treatment for acute kidney injury other than renal replacement therapy (e.g. dialysis), which is inconvenient for the patient and expensive for health services. NGAL determination allows kidney injury to be detected almost as soon as it occurs, and not at the later stage when the consequences of impaired kidney function can be detected by existing routine tests and the damage has been consolidated.

It is expected that the availability of NGAL ELISAs for both animals and human patients will show synergic effects. The good results already obtained in patients have stimulated the demand for NGAL tests in animals. It is also expected that NGAL research in laboratory animals will promote an increased routine use of NGAL determinations in patients. The launching of this new rat NGAL test is therefore also expected to have a positive effect on the human NGAL market.

BioPorto has given high priority to launching a rat NGAL kit, as rats are among the most frequently used laboratory animals for research on kidney damage. The rat NGAL test can thus be used in the development of new treatments for kidney damage, to detect nephrotoxic side effects of new drugs, and for basic science research on kidney injury and kidney diseases.

It is therefore expected that the use of NGAL as a toxicological marker of kidney damage in rats could prove to be of considerable importance in the preclinical evaluation of new pharmacological products, as it is much cheaper and easier to determine NGAL than to carry out a microscopic examination of the kidney itself, which is the typical experimental end-point today. BioPorto’s expectations are supported by an incipient demand for animal NGAL ELISAs from the pharmaceutical industry and the CROs (contract research organizations) that carry out much of the industry’s testing, as well as from large publicly-funded international research institutions.

The new Rat NGAL ELISA Kit is the first kit to be entirely produced in BioPorto’s own facilities. It is thus the first result of the process development initiated to establish the company’s own production, with a view to securing, accelerating and cost-cutting on the company’s kit production. The present kit is expected to be followed by a series of further ELISA kits, in the first instance for determining NGAL in other laboratory animals.

Turnover of the new test has been taken into account in the budget for 2008, so that the financial expectations for the current year are unchanged.

Further information:

Thea Olesen, CEO

Christina Tønnesen, Investor Relations

Tel.: +45 4529 0000

E-mail: investor@bioporto.com