CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Swedish software maker Spotfire, which has a US headquarters here, last week closed its second round of venture capital financing, having raised $6 million.

HAMBURG, Germany --Sequenom, a transnational pharmacogenomics technology company headquartered here, completed a $37 million financing round through equity funding last week.

ROCKVILLE, Md.--Celera Genomics here said it has entered a five-year deal to provide a subscription to its database products and early access to new genomic information to Novartis Pharma.

ROCKVILLE, Md.--Human Genome Sciences opened a $42 million plant here this month, where it said it will manufacture drugs resulting from genomics research and development.

SAN DIEGO--The US National Cancer Institute has awarded a $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to Structural Bioinformatics to support its work developing nonpeptide small-molecule antagonists targeting the HER2 breast cancer-related gene.

NEW YORK--The SNP Consortium, a nonprofit entity, was officially formed this month by 10 pharmaceutical companies and the UK s Wellcome Trust for the purpose of identifying and making available in a public database 300,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the human genome. Four leading genome sequencing centers--the Whitehead Institute, Washington University School of Medicine, Stanford s Human Genome Center, and the Wellcome Trust s Sanger Centre--will generate genome-wide SNP data for the venture.

NEW YORK--When bioinformatics was young and biologists were more familiar with gel slides than gel sequencers, the Macintosh point-and-click platform offered an easy entrée to a new world of analysis. Macintosh quickly dominated the world of genetic research and, as technology evolved, it often did so around Mac platforms.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--When Cereon was founded early last year in a collaboration between Monsanto and Millennium Pharmaceuticals it gave Monsanto a running start into agricultural genomics discovery by providing the life sciences giant access to technologies, including bioinformatics, that Millennium had already developed for drug discovery. Cereon s mission became to develop core competencies in bioinformatics DNA sequencing, physical mapping, expression profiling, and high-throughput screening.

HINXTON, UK--At least nine public research institutions that generate gene expression information using DNA microarray technology have agreed to begin submitting their results to a new public archive. The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) here, an outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, will build the database, which it intends to unveil later this year.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--A week after announcing a new business plan that includes licensing components of its in-house technology engine to life sciences companies that seek to determine protein function, Molecular Applications Group said Monsanto will be its first such customer. Monsanto scientists will employ three of Molecular Applications proprietary algorithms to identify, select, and prioritize targets for agricultural and pharmaceutical applications.

OAKLAND, Calif.--Pangea Systems has released GeneWorld 3.5, an upgraded version of its sequence analysis and annotation software package.

ALAMEDA, Calif.--Strata Biosciences here was awarded a $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the US National Cancer Institute for a six-month functional genomics technology innovation project.

HAYWARD, Calif.--Lynx Therapeutics reached agreement on March 31 with Hoechst Marion Roussel and its affiliate Hoechst Schering AgrEvo to activate a subscription enabling AgrEvo to access a number of Lynx technologies.

ALAMEDA, Calif.--GeneTrace Systems, a privately held genomics and bioinformatics company, inaugurated its automated high-throughput single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) validation process line last month.

PRINCETON, NJ--Pharmacopeia has bought the right to distribute Molecular Simulations software in Japan and other Asia Pacific countries. The $10 million deal was with Teijin, a Japanese chemical and pharmaceutical company.

SAN DIEGO, Calif.--A study undertaken by Nanogen and the Pediatric Oncology Branch of the US National Cancer Institute describing advances in Nanogen's single-nucleotide polymorphism discrimination technology was published in Nature Biotechnology this month.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--Jonathan Rothberg, chairman of the board of CuraGen, said he has begun a search for a president and chief executive officer for the company.

SAN DIEGO, Calif.--NaviCyte, a wholly owned subsidiary of Trega Biosciences, entered an agreement with the R.W. Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute to collaborate on the development of NaviCyte's pharmacokinetic informatics tools for drug target selection.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, a company that exploits gene variation for the pharmaceutical industry, named Joel Claiborne Stephens as director of population genomics.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Affymetrix said it will use the proceeds of a recent stock sale to expand its manufacturing capabilities, research and development facilities, and sales and marketing efforts, and for other general corporate purposes.

HOUSTON--Compaq Computer announced this month that it will begin offering its AlphaServers running Tru64 Unix to enterprise markets such as high-performance technical computing.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--After a management reorganization in January that put in place a new board chairman and a chief operating officer, Molecular Applications Group this month introduced one more change to management and a revamped business strategy. Myra Williams stepped down from her role as CEO to concentrate on business development as a vice-chairman for the company from her home in Princeton, NJ. Board member and venture capitalist Debbie Yu was appointed acting CEO.

SEATTLE--In the next six months, Todd Smith will shoot for a milestone at his bioinformatics company: filing for a patent on his software products. It s an exciting prospect, he said, but one that raises questions.

OAKLAND, Calif.--Bioinformatics joined the ranks of industries scrambling to market their wares on the web last week when Pangea Systems announced that it will form an alliance with Palo Alto-based e-commerce company Isadra. The companies plan to develop an infrastructure for a life sciences internet information hub.

BETHESDA, Md.--Larry Hunter, formerly director of the Machine Learning Project at the US National Institutes of Health s National Library of Medicine, has joined the National Cancer Institute as chief of the Molecular Statistics and Bioinformatics section, a newly created entity in the Biometrics Research Branch of the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program. Hunter, who is also president of the International Society for Computational Biology and an adjunct associate professor at George Mason University, told BioInform that the branch intends to begin using statistical and machine-learning approaches to understand the molecular nature of cancer.