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December 1, 2004

Natural Selection and Althea Technologies in Strategic Alliance to Provide Gene Expression Biomarker Discovery

San Diego, CA – Althea Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of innovative technologies and services in gene expression analysis, and Natural Selection, Inc. (NSI), a leader in the application of sophisticated computational intelligence algorithms to problems in bioinformatics, announced today that the companies have signed a collaborative agreement to provide a new range of services. NSI and Althea will be offering a comprehensive set of services that will allow researchers to progress from global to focused gene expression analysis enabling the discovery and application of gene expression signatures for a targeted disease or drug activity in an expeditious and cost-effective manner. Both firms will contribute to future product design that will take advantage of NSI's expertise in identification of gene signatures from expression data and Althea's proprietary eXpress Profiling™ multiplexed PCR technology that allows for high throughput gene expression analysis.

"We see our relationship with Natural Selection as a key component of our Signature Discovery™ Services, providing advanced methods of data mining to extract biomarkers from the large gene expression data sets that we are generating for our clients and in our research collaborations," stated Dr. Joseph Monforte, Chief Scientific Officer of Althea Technologies, Inc. "The best-in-class expertise provided by Dr. Fogel and his colleagues enables us to create predictive algorithms for a variety of diagnostic and research applications."

"We are very pleased to be working with Althea Technologies and look forward to incorporating methods of computational intelligence in ways that can benefit the health community with new diagnostic tools," said Dr. Gary Fogel, Vice President of Natural Selection, Inc. "These methods have proven to be very powerful in recognizing patterns in complex environments faced in defense, homeland security and commercial systems applications. We believe this collaboration will further extend this technology in the health sciences."

About Althea Technologies, Inc.

Althea Technologies, a leading San Diego-based pharmaceutical services firm, provides critical manufacturing and development services that support researchers worldwide in their advancement of novel therapies and efforts to apply new genomic information. Althea has introduced new services and technologies for the identification and understanding of gene signatures with innovative tools such as the company's proprietary eXpress Profiling™ technology. Additionally, Althea provides services including cGMP contract manufacturing of recombinant proteins and DNA-based therapeutics and vaccines, aseptic filing, and gene quantification using real-time PCR and gene expression analysis under GLP conditions. Form more information, visit www.altheatech.com.

About Natural Selection, Inc.

Natural Selection, Inc. was founded in 1993 to address complex problems in industry, medicine, and defense. The company possesses unique expertise in computational intelligence techniques, including evolutionary computation, neural networks, and fuzzy logic. The corporation's research efforts support the discovery of new pharmaceuticals, the automated detection and discovery of important patterns and processes in bioinformatics and medical informatics, computer-assisted diagnosis, and a variety of military and industrial projects. For more information, visit www.natural-selection.com.