Dermatology

InforSense, Thermo OEM agreement may accelerate protein biomarker discovery.

SNP market at about $400 million; in next 5 years to $1 billion.

Seeking new ways to improve both information sharing and hasten preclinical and clinical research of promising new cancer drugs, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and AstraZeneca in early January announced the creation of master agreements governing the terms of research that should help shave months off the time between when a promising drug is identified and when it is brought to clinical trials.

Solvay Pharmaceuticals recently announced an agreement to collaborate with the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research to investigate a novel mechanism of action to treat gastrointestinal motility disorders.

Osiris Therapeutics announced recently the expansion of a licensing agreement with JCR Pharmaceuticals that will see the Ashiya, Japan-based company sell adult human stem cells for use in drug screening and evaluation in Japan. The cell technology will allow companies involved in drug discovery and development to screen test compounds for a variety of metabolic effects.

Insightful Corp. announced in mid-May that it received two awards for bioinformatics work under the U.S. government’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. A Phase II contract with the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and a Phase I grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are worth a total of approximately $850,000. Both projects involve Insightful’s InFact software, which performs natural language-based analysis and search functions on large quantities of text.