press release archive

Rigel Appoints Susan Molineaux, PH.D. Senior Director, Combinatorial Biology

South San Francisco, CA, July 12, 2000 - July 12, 2000

Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. today announced the appointment of Susan M. Molineaux, Ph.D., to the position of senior director, combinatorial biology and drug discovery. Dr. Molineaux will be responsible for the continued development and application of Rigel's platform combinatorial biology technology, which enables the rapid discovery of novel, functionally-validated drug targets and the small molecule drugs that regulate them, without first having to know the sequence of the genes involved. Dr. Molineaux will supervise a 42-person department and will report directly to Donald G. Payan, M.D., Rigel's chief scientific officer and cofounder.

"Susan's scientific, technical, and managerial expertise makes her uniquely suited to direct our functional genomics studies," said Dr. Payan. "We are delighted that she has joined the company and the timing couldn't be better, given that Rigel is quickly moving into the later stages of drug discovery on several cancer and immunology research programs."

Dr. Molineaux, 46, joins Rigel with 11 years experience in pharmaceutical industry research and drug development, six of those at an executive level. Recently, Dr. Molineaux served as Vice President, Drug Development Research at PRAECIS Pharmaceuticals, where, under her direction, a new drug target for Alzheimer's disease was discovered and an Investigational New Drug application filed for a novel inhibitor of that target. Previously, Dr. Molineaux spent five years at Merck and Company, where she played a key role in the discovery and characterization of a novel immunosuppressive drug target. She has developed an expertise in immunology, particularly in the area of inflammation, and in various technical aspects of drug development, including creation of high-throughput and in vitro assays to identify and validate new drug targets and in the production of peptide libraries. Dr. Molineaux frequently publishes her research in leading scientific journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cell and Nature, and is a co-author on five patents relating to her work in the area of Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Molineaux earned her Ph.D. in genetics at Johns Hopkins University, and completed her postdoctural fellowship under Richard Axel, MD, at Columbia University.

Based in South San Francisco, California, Rigel is a privately-held post-genomics combinatorial biology company focused on discovering a portfolio of novel small molecule drugs based on the Company's rapid drug target identification and validation technology. Rigel has nine product development programs in immunology and cancer and has entered into collaboration agreements with Cell Genesys; Janssen Pharmaceutica, a Johnson & Johnson company; Neurocrine Biosciences; Novartis and Pfizer.