Tel Aviv, Israel
January 30, 2002

Compugen Ltd. (Nasdaq:CGEN) today announced the establishment of Agro-LEADS, a majority owned subsidiary focusing on agricultural biotechnology and plant genomics, with offices and laboratories located in Rehovot, Israel.

The agricultural activity now being established as a separate company was initiated in 1999 as a division of Compugen, with the objective of overcoming the limitations of both classical breeding and modern biotechnology in order to generate improved crops and new agricultural biotechnology products in an economically efficient way. This objective is accomplished by integrating computational biology and plant genomics with classical breeding approaches into high-throughput platforms for the purpose of accelerating, directing and mimicking the natural evolution process.

Agro-LEADS' high-throughput platforms utilize an extensive base of proprietary and licensed technologies including Compugen's LEADS computational biology platform, the Weizmann Institute of Science's patent pending "tomato gene machine" for functional genomics in plants, and various high-throughput processes for molecular analysis of genomic components and other technologies developed while the agricultural activities were a division within Compugen.

Agro-LEADS' core product focus will be the development of seeds with new and highly improved traits. In addition, an important aspect of the new company's business strategy will be collaborative initiatives with other organizations in areas such as crop protection products, nutritionally enhanced crops, and the use of plants as factories for nutraceuticals, and industrial and therapeutic products.

Agro-LEADS' current multidisciplinary research team consists of professionals from the fields of plants genetics, bioinformatics, molecular biology and classical breeding, co-founded and managed jointly by Dr. Hagai Karchi and Dr. Rafael Meissner. Dr. Karchi and Dr. Meissner each hold a Ph.D.in Plant Genetics from the Weizmann Institute of Science and each has more than ten years of scientific and commercial experience in the field.

"We were extremely pleased by the rapid and important progress achieved by this team, and believe that establishing our agricultural activity as a separate company will provide it with the necessary focus and committed resources to fulfill its substantial potential," stated Mor Amitai, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of Compugen Ltd. "In general, we believe that this is the best model for Compugen to leverage and maximize the returns from the Company's extensive and growing base of proprietary technologies, while maintaining our core focus on life science for human health," Dr. Amitai
continued.

"There is a rapidly growing and changing demand for new plant-based products that cannot be met by either classical breeding or new genomic technologies now available to the industry," said Hagai Karchi, Ph.D., co-founder, Agro-LEADS. "The proven strength of Compugen's LEADS platform in generating high quality gene predictions combined with our functional genomics system will facilitate the company's strong intellectual property position. We are confident that this, together with our proprietary plant breeding platforms, will provide substantial commercial advantages and generate
significant opportunities in relevant markets," added Dr. Karchi.

Compugen (Nasdaq:CGEN) is a leader in merging computational technologies with biology and medicine to enhance drug discovery and development. The Company's innovative predictive biology technologies support two complementary product development and commercialization divisions. Compugen's BioApplications division offers high value products and services that enable and enhance the discovery and functional analysis of genes, proteins and cell processes. Compugen's Novel Genomics division is developing human therapeutic and diagnostic products based on target genes, proteins and other intellectual property discovered through the Company's innovative research activities. For additional information, please visit Compugen's Corporate Web Site at www.cgen.com  and the Company's Internet research engine for molecular biologists, www.LabOnWeb.com.