Tripos To Restate Prior-Year Results
Following on the heels of similar announcements from informatics firms Accelrys and Lion Biosciences [BioInform 02-09-04], Tripos last week said that it plans to revise the way it recognizes revenue for its software licenses.
Due to the revised policy, the company said it will have to restate its financial results for prior fiscal years.
Tripos also postponed the release of its 2003 fourth-quarter and year-end earnings, which were scheduled for release on Feb. 12.
Tripos said that since 1998, it has recognized revenue from time-based software license sales upon delivery of the software, while recognizing the revenue attributed to customer support ratably over the term of the contract. The company said that it will now recognize certain revenue from license fees under these agreements ratably over the contractual term, and will restate its historical financial statements accordingly.
The accounting changes do not affect liquidity or cash flow, Tripos said, and “do not reflect any change in the company’s future business prospects.”
Tripos estimated that previously reported discovery software sales for fiscal years 1998 through 2002 will decrease, while the effect on 2003 revenues will be neutral or positive.
Celera to Deposit Human Genome in GenBank, Release Assembler Source Code
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Celera Genomics has vowed to deposit the draft human genome sequence it published in 2001, as well as two more recent human genome assemblies, in GenBank.
The company also pledged to release the source code for its Celera Assembler algorithm at http://myscience.appliedbiosystems.com/publications/compass/index.jsp.
The release of the sequence may help bury the hatchet in an acrimonious verbal battle waged between Celera scientists and the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium within the pages of PNAS over the last few years BioInform 03-04-02]. In the latest PNAS paper, entitled “Whole-genome shotgun assembly and comparison of human genome assemblies,” members of the original Celera team once again asserted the virtues of their sequencing methodology in response to previous IHGSC papers that questioned “the independence of the genome assemblies reported by Celera.”
The paper compares Celera’s whole-genome shotgun assembly with the most recent “finished” assembly from NCBI (build 34, released July 2003). Not surprisingly, the authors — most of them now affiliated with new organizations — found that “a high-quality genome sequence can be assembled from the Celera proprietary data alone, independently of the IHGSC data and methods,” and that “WGSA provides valuable additions and corrections to the nearly complete human genome, NCBI-34.”
Penn Group Invests $500K in ProSanos
The Life Sciences Greenhouse of Central Pennsylvania has invested $500,000 in ProSanos, a biomedical informatics company with headquarters in La Jolla, Calif., and a product development office in Harrisburg.
The new investment is from the Greenhouse’s Gap Fund, which provides pre-seed and seed-stage capital for life science startups in central Pennsylvania in the form of convertible debt-to-equity or equity investments.
Silicon Genetics Extends Affy Partnership
Silicon Genetics said last week that it has entered into a collaborative agreement with Affymetrix to better integrate Silicon Genetics’ software products with the Affymetrix GeneChip platform.
The agreement adds to a deal the companies concluded in July, in which Silicon Genetics was granted permission to distribute Affy’s probe-level data directly within its application software.
Sun Opens Bioinformatics COE in India
Sun Microsystems has signed a memorandum of understanding with India’s Center for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics to fund a center of excellence in medical bioinformatics.
The proposed center will be one of Sun’s nine centers of excellence in bioinformatics. Sun’s partners in the COE effort include the government of Andhra Pradesh and the IT consultancy Tata Consultancy Services. Sun will provide an investment of approximately $5 million.
Workshop Planned for Text-Mining Evaluation
A workshop to discuss the results of BioCreative (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction systems in Biology) — a CASP-like evaluation for approaches to mining the scientific literature — will be held in Granada, Spain, March 28-31, 2004.
Further information on the workshop is available at: http://www.pdg.cnb.uam.es/BioLINK/workshop_BioCreative_04/.