PALO ALTO, Calif.--CV Therapeutics and Incyte Pharmaceuticals have entered into a collaboration to develop a prototype gene expression database in the area of cardiovascular biology.

PARIS--A new venture capital investment fund, Auriga, was launched last week with plans to invest half of its $400 million in startup capital in life sciences companies, including businesses in genomics and biotechnology.

WOBURN, Mass.--Emerging genomics company AlphaGene here announced the appointment of John Zabriskie and Steven Hochberg to its board of directors last week.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa--Winston Hide, director of the South African National Bioinformatics Institute here, has announced the release of an upgrade to the institute's Sequence Tag Alignment and Consensus Knowledgebase (Stack).

SAN FRANCISCO--Eos Biotechnology, a startup genomics company here, has announced a research collaboration with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute in Melbourne, Australia, to identify genes with diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic potential for breast and colorectal cancers.

VANCOUVER, BC--NovaDx International and its wholly-owned subsidiary Proteomix here entered into an agreement with German chemical and pharmaceutical company Bayer under which NovaDx will identify a series of osteoporosis genes.

MUNICH--MediGene, a late-stage biopharmaceutical company developing drugs and technologies against disease targets in the areas of cancer and cardiology, completed a $25.7 million private placement involving institutional and private investors last week.

SAN DIEGO, Calif.--Acadia Pharmaceuticals, a privately held genomics drug discovery company headquartered here, with chemical research facilities in Copenhagen, raised nearly $10.7 million through a private placement of stock in late August.

FOSTER CITY, Calif.--Perkin-Elmer GenScope, a division of PE Applied Biosystems, announced that it is using Persistence Software's PowerTier application server to build a distributed gene monitoring application.

SALT LAKE CITY--Myriad Genetics has been awarded a patent entitled "Island Hopping--a Method to Sequence Rapidly Very Large Fragments of DNA" by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Spotfire, a supplier of data exploration software, announced that the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) has joined the Spotfire Network University Partnership Program. Under the Spotfire Network license agreement, Spotfire Pro is made available to al

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Following an alliance with Bayer, Millennium Pharmaceuticals said it has reached over $1 billion in potential pharmaceutical partnership funding.

NORWALK, Conn.--Perkin-Elmer announced that, subject to shareholder and final board approval, it plans to distribute a new class of common stock intended to track the separate performance of Celera Genomics, a new business unit formed through an alliance between Perkin-Elmer and

SAN CARLOS, Calif.--Deltagen, a biotechnology company specializing in gene function determination, announced the completion of a second round of financing that netted $11.5 million.

SAN DIEGO--Privately held Structural Bioinformatics here announced that BioChem Pharma, a Canadian biopharmaceutical company, has accepted a lead compound for the treatment of a human viral infectious disease, triggering a milestone payment in the company's collaboration with Bio

WOBURN, Mass.--Genetic Research Instrumentation has obtained exclusive rights to distribute Genetic MicroSystems' DNA microarray instrumentation in the UK and Ireland.

SALT LAKE CITY--In a collaboration that Myriad Genetics here values at $51 million, German pharmaceutical company Schering will use Myriad's protein-to-protein interaction technology ProNet to study biochemical pathways of major diseases.

GAITHERSBURG, Md.--Gene Logic here announced that it was issued a US patent for an enzyme-based genomics technology, "differential display," in which restriction enzymes reveal differences in gene expression among various tissue samples.

PARIS--Genset, a genomics company here, struck a two-year research agreement with Pharmacia and Upjohn in which the companies will use Genset's pharmacogenomics technology to identify genetic markers among patients involved in clinical studies of a Pharmacia and Upj

HINXTON, UK--The Sanger Centre made available on its web site, http://genomic.sanger.ac.uk/, a new database of predicted genes and protein sequences called INFOGENEP.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Eli Lilly has launched an 18-month software development program with Nonlinear Dynamics here that is designed to accelerate Lilly's drug discovery process.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Incyte Pharmaceuticals announced a broad genomic data collaboration that provides Schering-Plough with access to Incyte's microarray technology and databases.

HAMBURG--Sequenom announced that its DNA MassArray Automated Process Line is now operational at its facility here.

OAKLAND, Calif.--Bristol-Myers Squibb has licensed from Pangea Systems here state-of-the-art computational tools that will allow faster and more accurate clustering and alignment of expressed sequence tags (EST's) and full-length sequences within large public and proprietary data

YORK, UK--Molecular Simulations, a subsidiary of Pharmacopeia, said it will provide research funding for four years to the new Centre for Structural Biology at the University of York here.