Research Areas

In late March, biotechnology company Icoria announced it had reached an agreement to sell its agricultural genomic assets to multinational agriculture giant Monsanto.

Drug discovery informatics company Compugen Ltd. and pharmaceutical company Novartis in mid-April announced a research collaboration in the field of systems biology, that Compugen says will aid in the development of its next-generation predictive modeling products.

A $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will support the RNA Ontology Consortium, an international team of scientists developing a shared vocabulary and system for discussing RNA structure and function.

Elsevier MDL, a provider of cheminformatic solutions to the pharmaceutical and life-sciences industries, recently launched a dedicated, phased program to build a robust, scalable, enterprise-strength electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) built on MDL’s Isentris technology and scheduled for delivery in 2006.

Pharmaceutical researchers and others found themselves with a new tool in late March when Agilent Technologies—a provider of technologies for life sciences, chemical, communications and electronics analysis—released a free automated literature search plug-in for Cytoscape version 2.1.

Caliper Life Sciences’ newly-minted strategy of out-licensing its patent estate to gain greater penetration within the life sciences market gained more steam recently with the late April announcement that lab-on-a-chip giant Affymetrix had agreed to license a portion of the company’s microfluidics technology.

Whatman Inc., has expanded its reach into the drug discovery market and DNA purification with the recent introduction of the EasyClone 384 plate, which replaces traditional freezer-storage methods and allows biotechnology, pharmaceutical, government and academic research labs to archive, ship and purify clones at room temperature.

In April, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, located here granted licensing rights for U.S. Patent, No. 6,855,523 to Hamilton Thorne Biosciences, putting the Beverly, Mass.-based DNA technology and automated instrumentation company in a strong position to market a potential competitor to PCR: linear and exponential rolling circle amplification (RCA).

Solexa Inc. recently raised $32.5 million in private equity financing, the bulk of which will be used to fund further development and commercialization of a synthesis-by-sequencing (SBS) molecular array platform for genetic analysis.