Rigel Pharmaceuticals Inc has signed agreements with The Pennsylvania State University and Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation to license from these institutions new intellectual property and technology complementary to the Company's current research and development programs.

Rigel has in-licensed the SICLOPPS, or cyclic peptide, technology from Penn State that will help enable the Company to develop intracellular cyclic peptide libraries. Peptide libraries are key sources of diversity for identifying and developing new therapeutics such as peptides or small molecule drugs. Rigel plans to incorporate this technology into its existing functional genomics and target discovery and validation infrastructure.

Rigel has also in-licensed the patent estate to the RBX, or ROC1, protein from the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. This protein is an ubiquitin ligase target with potential therapeutic importance in both oncology and inflammatory disease - two areas in which Rigel is already developing product candidates. Ubiquitin ligases comprise a new class of targets with roles in most disease states. Rigel has already initiated high-throughput screening with this ubiquitin ligase target.