CHIRON CORPORATION SELECTS CHEMNAVIGATOR FOR VIRTUAL SCREENING COLLABORATION

ChemNavigator's new 3-DPL™ Map technology will be used to screen "in-silico" millions of compounds for Chiron's Hepatitis C program.

San Diego, CA - ChemNavigator today announced that Chiron Corporation has signed a collaboration agreement to work with ChemNavigator in the area of virtual screening against Chiron's proprietary 3D model of an HCV drug target. The goal of the collaboration is the identification of new biologically active compounds to be developed for the treatment of Hepatitis C.

Under the terms of the agreement, ChemNavigator will apply its new proprietary database docking technology, 3-DPL Map, to Chiron's 3D protein model to identify likely binding compounds from within the millions of commercially accessible drug-like chemical samples tracked within ChemNavigator's iResearch™ Library. Chiron will test the compounds in its HCV assays. Throughout the collaboration period, Chiron will be alerted to any new drug-like samples processed into the iResearch Library that fall within Chiron's areas of interest.

The collaboration represents an extension of Chiron's current corporate subscription agreement for access to ChemNavigator's iResearch System. Financial terms were not disclosed but include success fees for the identification of new biologically active compounds as well as subsequent milestone payments for the advancement of those compounds in the drug development process.

"Today's announcement with Chiron marks the first commercial collaboration centered on our new 3-DPL Map technology," said Scott Hutton, president and chief executive officer of ChemNavigator. "Using 3-DPL Map and our iResearch Library, we will identify and acquire biologically active compounds for Chiron at a fraction of the cost and risk of traditional drug screening programs."

3-DPL Map Technology
Developed by Dr. Tad Hurst and his research group at ChemNavigator, 3-DPL Map technology is used to rapidly identify drug-like compounds that are much more likely to show biological activity against a drug target than compounds selected through traditional methods. The technology works by simulating the interactions between flexible drug-like molecules and the entire surface of a 3D protein model. "At analysis speeds of up to 10 compounds per second across an entire protein's surface, 3-DPL Map is a generation beyond other virtual screening technologies," states Dr. Hurst, chief technical officer of ChemNavigator. "The 3-DPL Map strategy of considering the entire protein surface for each compound allows it to identify potential biologically active compounds overlooked by other virtual screening techniques."

About ChemNavigator, Inc.
ChemNavigator is a privately held discovery-informatics company organized in May of 1999. We focus on the discovery of new drugs through proprietary chemical data analysis (cheminformatics) techniques. Additionally, we provide drug discovery services to the biopharmaceutical industry. Our competitive advantage is our ability to create cheminformatics algorithms and systems for quickly analyzing millions of disparate chemical-data records and identifying unique potential drug compounds. The cornerstone of our drug discovery program is our protein-ligand interaction mapping technology (3-DPL Map). 3-DPL Map allows us to discover hundreds of new biologically active, small-molecule compounds based upon protein targets discovered through the Human Genome Project.