Anaesthesia
Organon has been extremely successful over a number of years in its search for new, improved neuromuscular blocking agents (muscle relaxants MRs). MRs are used to produce relaxation of the voluntary muscles to patients undergoing anaesthesia. This allows anaesthetist to pass a ventilation tube into the airway, to allow the control of respiration, and to produce general relaxation of the skeletal muscles to assist the surgeon. The introduction of MRs into anaesthesia led to marked improvements in anaesthetic safety, by allowing even highly invasive surgery to be carried out under relatively light anaesthesia, and to permit the development of new surgical techniques for the treatment of conditions previously thought to be inoperable.

Tubocurarine (Intocostrin), a purified extract of the Chrondrodendron tomenstosum vine, was the first MR to be used routinely in clinical anaesthesia. Historically curare had been used over many centuries in a crude form by the South American Indians as a 'poison' on the tips of arrows to hunt prey. The success of tubocurarine led to huge efforts in chemical synthesis and pharmacological testing to find improved MRs with advantages over the naturally occurring alkaloids. Efforts within Organon over more than 35 years have focused on identifying MRs with improved time course profiles and better neuromuscular blocking selectivity. During that time synthetic efforts have been mainly directed toward producing compounds with a rigid aminosteriodal
nucleus attached to a wide range of different peripheral chemical substituents.

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