ANN ARBOR, Mich.--The University of Michigan will receive $5 million from the Parke-Davis unit of Warner-Lambert to help form a new program in bioinformatics, one of the areas highlighted in the university's Life Sciences Initiative.

GAITHERSBURG, Md.--Gene Logic said last week that with its Reads technology it has identified 2,513 genes associated with heart failure, renal disease, infertility, and other disorders, and 1,794 genes associated with mammalian toxicity.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--CuraGen announced the expansion of its proprietary database to include more than 70,000 novel human sequences, organized into large gene segments or assemblies, that are not publicly available.

WALTHAM, Mass.--Genome Therapeutics has begun work on a sequencing contract for Biogen.

SAN DIEGO, Calif.--Bristol-Myers Squibb has chosen WebLab ViewerPro from Molecular Simulations as its standard desktop molecular visualization and communication software.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Incyte Pharmaceuticals warned investors last week that it will report a larger than expected third-quarter loss.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Bayer announced that they have identified 18 novel drug targets and moved four of them into high-throughput screening in less than eight months.

OXFORD, UK--Oxford GlycoSciences and Cellular Genomics have formed a research collaboration focused on applying proteome analysis to the discovery of novel proteins and associated genes involved in key processes in immune system modulation.

ROCKVILLE, Md.--Celera Genomics announced that it has sequenced and delivered to its subscribers approximately 1.2 billion base pairs of human DNA. The company, which began sequencing the human genome on September 9, has identified a large number of new gene fragments.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Spotfire announced that Merck has licensed its new-leads discovery system for distribution worldwide across all Merck research sites.

PARIS--Genset announced that it has signed a gene libraries agreement with the Genetics Institute unit of Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, the pharmaceutical division of American Home Products, and is also launching a direct marketing initiative.

ARLINGTON, Va.--A five-university partnership led by Vanderbilt University will develop bioengineering educational technologies and curricula at a new Engineering Research Center funded by the US National Science Foundation.

FRANKFURT, Germany--Hoechst Marion Roussel and Ariad Pharmaceuticals announced that Hoechst intends to purchase Ariad's 50 percent ownership stake in the Hoechst-Ariad Genomics Center, a joint venture created in 1997.

ROCKVILLE, Md.--The Institute for Genomic Research was awarded $7.2 million by a US Department of Agriculture, National Science Foundation, and US Department of Energy triagency initiative focused on rice genome sequencing.

ITHACA, NY--Cornell University researchers may have created the most cost-effective supercomputer in a project that linked off-the-shelf components--a cluster of 256 Intel Pentium III microprocessors--together to act as a super-computer.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--Cura-Gen has exercised its right under existing collaborative agreements with Biogen and Genentech to borrow a total of $26 million. Simultaneously, CuraGen converted these loans into approximately 1.6 million shares of CuraGen stock at $16 a share.

OAKLAND, Calif.--Pangea Systems announced a sponsored research agreement with the Center for Bioinformatics of the University of Pennsylvania through which the two groups will collaborate on developing new software tools for visualizing biological data.

BERKELEY, Calif.--The University of California, Berkeley, has launched a $500 million health sciences initiative to link biological and physical sciences and engineering to foster medical advances, and is recruiting bioinformatics specialists to take part.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--The recent news that Incyte Pharmaceuticals is expecting a net loss in the range of $27 million for the year raised questions among industry observers about the viability of the genomic-data-selling business, and about the stability of the company that was the first in the genomics business to turn a profit.

ROCKVILLE, Md.--The Institute for Genomic Research and Neomorphic of Berkeley, Calif., have teamed up to develop new annotation software with the immediate goal of assisting in TIGR s Arabidopsis sequencing project. In the future however, both organizations plan to apply it to other genomes, such as the rice and human genomes, David Kulp, Neomorphic s vice-president of research, told BioInform. TIGR needed a mechanism to allow its biologists to sit down in front of the data, look at all of the available evidence, and make curated annotations, observed Kulp.

CHICAGO--Last week Motorola became the first technology company to join the SNP Consortium. The group behind the two-year, $48 million initiative to develop a public database of single-nucleotide polymorphisms had, until now, consisted of 10 major pharmaceutical companies and the Wellcome Trust. As the news indicates, membership is not restricted to pharmaceutical companies or endowments, but a $3 million contribution to the consortium is required, Arthur Holden, the consortium s chairman and CEO, told BioInform.

BETHESDA, Md.--The US National Institutes of Health announced last week that it will launch, earlier than expected, a mouse genome sequencing project. Ten laboratories have been selected to be part of the Mouse Genome Sequencing Network and receive, initially, $21 million in combined funding over seven months.

HINXTON, UK--With new sequencing equipment, computer hardware, and information storage facilities installed, the Sanger Centre here is on track to meet the accelerated deadlines of the Human Genome Project, said Phil Butcher, Sanger s head of information technology.

CLAY CENTER, Neb.--With newly installed, high-speed, mass-spectrometry-based, genotyping technology from the San Diego-based company Sequenom, the US Department of Agriculture s Meat Animal Research Center here will be able to expand upon what already may be the most extensive public livestock genomics database available.

CLEMSON, SC--How 28-year-old entrepreneur Maciek Sasinowski came to start his own bioinformatics company had a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time.