Organon And Signal Alliance; Organon And Chiron Alliance

- Organon, a unit of Akzo Nobel, has agreed a three-year research collaboration with Signal Pharmaceuticals to discover new drug targets. Funded by Organon, Signal will identify novel genes and will develop screening assays for use by Organon to identify small molecule drugs. In addition, Signal will receive milestone payments. Meantime, Organon and Chiron are to combine their proprietary molecular diversity approaches for creating compound libraries with receptor screening techniques to identify new drug compounds. Organon will pay Chiron an annual fee and will fund research at the company. They will individually retain certain product rights for particular indications, and in these circumstances milestone payments will be made to each other as well as royalties on sales.