Organon and Sareum Announce Research Collaboration in Autoimmune Disease

Organon, the human health care business unit of Akzo Nobel and Sareum Holdings plc have announced a collaborative research agreement.

The aim of this collaboration, in which Sareum will potentially dedicate a multi-disciplinary research team for over one year, is to generate lead chemical series for development by Organon into therapies for autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.

Sareum will endeavor to determine the three-dimensional structures of two of the Organon autoimmune disease protein targets and then deploy its innovative Template Screening method to identify compounds suitable for optimisation into lead drug candidates, using its automated medicinal chemistry platform.

In return, Sareum will receive research fees and success milestone payments.

This is the second announcement relating to the trading update issued by Sareum on 5th January 2006 where Sareum stated that it had entered into several collaborations in late December, one of which is with Organon.

Commenting on the agreement, Sareum’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Tim Mitchell, said, "We are delighted that Organon has chosen Sareum as their partner in drug lead identification and optimisation."

"This is the largest collaboration we have signed to date, and brings together our expertise in protein structure determination, Template Screening and automated chemistry. We look forward to successfully identifying novel drug leads for this important therapeutic area."

Dr David Nicholson, Executive Vice President Global Research, Organon International Inc. added, "This collaboration with Sareum fits very well with our ambitions of expanding the breadth and depth of our research programs."

"Access to new technologies and the focus on new therapeutic areas such as immunology are important building blocks to accomplish these ambitions."

"We believe that expanded research activities through partnerships are critical to fueling our future pipeline."