Internal Medicine

Pfizer Inc. in mid-June announced its $1.9 billion acquisition of Vicuron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing anti-infectives. Vicuron’s pipeline includes two drugs — anidulafungin, for fungal infections, and dalbavancin, for Gram-positive infections — that Vicuron expects will reach markets in early 2006.

A special meeting of Argonaut shareholders in early June formally approved the sale of the company’s assets and consumables and process instrument business to Biotage, a move that strengthens the company’s offerings in medicinal chemistry, thermal synthesis, cleanup and purification systems. Total purchase price amounted to 145 million Swedish krona or about $21.2 million. In all, sales from Argonaut products are expected to add over $18 million in annual sales to Biotage’s bottom line, an increase of roughly 25 percent.

Sometimes as an editor you have too many things rattling around in your head. So consider this my mid-summer cleaning... Front and center is the acquisition of Vicuron Pharmaceuticals by Pfizer for the tidy sum of $1.9 billion. Vicuron shareholders got a nifty one-day 84 percent increase in their share values based on Pfizer’s offer and there were howls that perhaps

Late last month, Upstate Group, a division of Serologicals Corp., and CXR Biosciences announced the two companies would work together to create an early-stage toxicology screening platform the companies believe will allow for more effective screening of drug candidate compounds.

BioPhysics Assay Laboratory (BioPAL) announced in mid-June that the National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health had awarded the company a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant.

Applied Biosystems Inc. and San Diego-based Invitrogen announced in early June a marketing alliance that will offer a suite of labeling products for proteomics researchers that includes Applied Bio’s ITRAQ and ICAT reagents and Invitrogen’s newly-released metabolomic labeling technology SILAC.

At the recent ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry, held in San Antonio, Texas, Ciphergen Biosystems introduced the new Deep Proteome Research Services that bring the company’s Equalizer technology to biomarker discovery and identification.

Although it did not disclose the terms of the transaction, Novasite Pharmaceuticals in mid-June announced the acquisition of Boston, Mass.-based PsyCheNomicS, a drug discovery company focused on diseases of the central nervous system (CNS).

Sweden

After the acquisition of TekCel, Magellan Biosciences indirectly continues to expand its automation instrument empire as TekCel announces its acquisition of ultra-low-temperature sample-management specialist Biophile, Inc., based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Biophile's systems are used for temperature-sensitive work involving DNA, tissue, and tumor storage, and complement the automation systems already in play at TekCel and Magellan Bioscience.

Neurologix, Inc. has licensed the humanin gene from Keio University in Tokyo, an agreement providing Neuro-logix exclusive worldwide rights (excluding Japan) to develop and commercialize therapeutics to treat brain and other central nervous system (CNS) disorders (excluding amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) using the technology. The humanin gene will be used in combination with Neurologix’s proprietary gene transfer technology and is expected to be the company’s lead compound for a novel and promising approach to Alzheimer’s disease.

Health Discovery Corp. may not hold all the cards when it comes to marketing and development of support vector machine (SVM) technology—the likely successor to neural networks. But it certainly has come very close with the recent completion of its acquisition of an extensive SVM patent portfolio previously owned by BioWulf Technologies and BioWulf Genomics.