VANCOUVER, BC--A $350,000 proteomics research grant awarded to Kinetek Pharmaceuticals by the National Research Council will be used for bioinformatics developments, the company said.

OAKLAND, Calif.--After raising $15 million in an initial round of Series C financing that was completed in December, privately held bioinformatics company Pangea Systems announced last month that it has raised an additional $4 million.

PARIS--French genomics company Genset has equipped its bioinformatics and biostatistics operations with a Sun Enterprise 10000 Server, So-laris Operating Environment, Java, and Sun's StorEdge A5000 storage system.

BOULDER, Colo.--Xenometrix, a biotechnology firm here announced last month that it granted licenses to both Incyte and SmithKline Beecham for its gene expression profiling technology.

CLEVELAND--NetGenics has released an enhanced version of its Synergy application framework for drug discovery, featuring the ability to work with Incyte Pharmaceuticals' sequence data and "Distributed Synergy," which enables transparent, real-time data sharing among research teams at multiple

SAN DIEGO, Calif.--Structural Bioinformatics said it has begun building up a European sales and marketing organization in its Copenhagen office in response to interest in its bioinformatics tools from the worldwide pharmaceutical industry.

MISSISSAUGA, Ont.--Base4 Bioinformatics was selected by the National Research Council here to provide administrative and technical support to the users of the Canadian Bioinformatics Resource that was launched last month.

REHOVOT, Israel--The Weizmann Institute of Science's Genome Center and Bioinformatics Unit announced the release of version 2.8 of GeneCards last month.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Silicon Graphics has released over the internet two bioinformatics software tools, Parallel Clustal W and High-Throughput Blast, free to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The programs are designed for Silicon Graphics Origin servers.

HEIDELBERG--Lion Bioscience, a young bioinformatics software firm here with its sights set on globalizing operations, will open a US office this spring, company officials told BioInform. In this business you have to be multinational, explained Christian Marcazzo, product manager for Lion s Sequence Retrieval System.

ST. LOUIS--The team of 42 researchers that generated, annotated, and deposited more than 352,000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) into a public mouse genome database introduced in January relied on a set of unique, custom-designed bioinformatics tools to complete the task. The tools, now publicly available through Washington University, are already being employed to find gene fragments in other organisms.

LONDON-- Bioinformatics has moved from high potential to key operational technology, remarked Dominic Clark of Glaxo Wellcome at the start of a conference he chaired here February 15-16. Proceedings of the meeting, Effectively Applying Bioinformatics to Maximize the Potential of High-Throughput Technologies, organized by IIR Bio/Technology Conferences, confirmed Clark s premise.

SAN RAMON, Calif.--D Trends, a bioinformatics software vendor here, has formed a genomics joint venture with several partners in China, including Haike Biotechnology, Haizhu High Tech Park Investment, and Zhongshan University. The new company, DragonTrends, will be a way for D Trends to tap the bioinformatics market in China, while its partners in China get access to D Trends technology and business knowledge, said a DragonTrends official. Terms of the joint venture were not disclosed.

SEATTLE--Medical genetics professor Maynard Olson, an award-winning geneticist at the University of Washington here, met with BioInform last month to discuss the future of genomics and the role of bioinformatics in the new millennium.

SAN RAMON, Calif.--D'Meditis, a joint venture formed in 1998 between Meditis, a Ukranian medical information technology firm, and bioinformatics company D'Trends, launched a new software tool last month.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.-- Spotfire, a bioinformatics software provider, reported that its fourth quarter earnings in 1998 exceeded $1 million and that the company gained 11 new customers during the quarter, including Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Rohm and Haas.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--Biopharmacauetical company Genelabs Technologies will receive $4.8 million to fund its second year of genomics-based research for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the US Department of Defense.

KIRKLAND, Wash.--Bioinformatics company Rosetta Inpharmatics here and genomics drug discovery company Acacia Biosciences announced this month that they have signed a merger agreement whereby Rosetta will acquire Acacia in a stock-for-stock transaction.

BERLIN--Atugen Biotechnology, a new company that has been formed as a spinoff of the target discovery and validation business of Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals, announced the completion of a $20 million initial financing round and the formal opening of its facilities on the Biomedical Research Campu

HEIDELBERG, Germany--Lion Bioscience has signed a licensing agreement allowing Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma to use Lion's bioinformatics platform, bioScout, to analyze sequence data and predict functions of target genes.

BETHESDA, Md.--The US National Human Genome Research Institute announced that money is available to support the advanced development of methods, hardware, and software technologies for genomic research with an emphasis on sequencing technologies.

EDMONTON, Alberta--BioTools has released a software package for DNA sequence analysis called GeneTool.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Incyte Pharmaceuticals this month expanded a genomic partnership with Johnson & Johnson that began in 1996.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Belmont Research, a subsidiary of PPD, last month released CrossGraphs version 2.0, an upgraded version of its data visualization and graphical reporting software.

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--Axys Pharmaceuticals, a genomics-based drug discovery company with a strong bioinformatics platform, has formed a joint venture with PPD, a global provider of contract and consulting research and development services.