• A. Carlsson Research AB, of Gothenburg, Sweden, entered a collaboration granting Merck & Co. Inc., of Whitehouse Station, N.J., a license to compounds from Carlsson Research's dopamine stabilizer program. Carlsson Research will receive an up-front payment of €8 million (US$8.8 million). Carlsson has brought its ACR16 through Phase I and Merck will further develop and market the compound. The agreement also contains a program that allows Merck to develop and market a series of Carlsson Research's compounds based on the dopamine stabilizer concept.

• Advion Biosciences Inc., of Ithaca, N.Y., and Thermo Electron Corp., of Waltham, Mass., entered a nonexclusive agreement to co-market their products to life sciences researchers. Advion and Thermo Electron will jointly coordinate the sales, marketing and support of what they said is the world's first fully automated chip-based nanoelectrospray MS system, the NanoMate 100 Automated Nanoelectrospray robotic system and ESI Chip.

• Affymetrix Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., said it would begin taking orders for versions of its mouse and rat expression arrays, the GeneChip Mouse Expression Set 430 and the GeneChip Rat Expression Set 230, respectively. The GeneChip Mouse Expression Set 430 covers more than 39,000 transcripts, including more than 34,000 mouse genes from several public mouse genome databases.

• The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology said at its 60th annual meeting held in Denver that the discovery of a new gene involved in asthma might provide a link between the development of asthma and obesity. The gene, called Resistin like molecule beta, belongs to a family of similar proteins that have been found to cause insulin resistance and obesity in mice. The gene also has been found to occur in the lungs of mice with asthma, possibly linking the two conditions, the group said.

• Avanir Pharmaceuticals Inc., of San Diego, presented data on AVP 13358 for asthma and allergy at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in Denver. In addition to its inhibitory effect on IgE, Avanir said the compound demonstrated an ability to suppress the antigen-stimulated IL-4 and IL-5 responses with potencies similar to those observed for IgE suppression. AVP 13358 also suppresses markers of disease in mouse models of asthma, including pulmonary lavage levels of IL-4, IL-5, eosinophils and lymphocytes, as well as expression of CD23 and the IL-4 receptor (IL-4Ralpha) on leukocytes. AVP 13358 is orally active and appears to be selective for the suppression of Th2 cytokine-mediated diseases.

• Avant Immunotherapeutics Inc., of Needham, Mass., reported signing an agreement with Pharmacia Corp., of Peapack, N.J., for the acquisition of intellectual property, including a portfolio of pending patent applications. The patent applications are directed to products or methods for stimulating an immune response against cholesteryl ester transfer protein, which mediates a cholesterol transport mechanism. Financial terms were not disclosed.

• Bruker Daltonics Inc., of Billerica, Mass., released at the PittCon 2003 conference in Orlando, Fla., a number of new drug discovery products. Its APEX-Q hybrid Q-q-FTMS (Fourier transform mass spectrometer) instrument combines a Q-q- front-end and a high-field FTMS magnet (9.4 Tesla or 12 Tesla) for high resolution. New ion optics and electronics help its BioTOFIII achieve standard resolution greater than 20,000. Its Esquire HCT (high capacity trap) is an ion trap mass spectrometer designed for faster and more sensitive analysis in proteomics and metabolomics. The company also released Compass, software for intuitive mass spectrometric instrument control and data processing, as well as for chemoinformatics and bioinformatics analysis.

• Caliper Technologies Corp., of Mountain View, Calif., released two microfluidic LabChip devices for use with its Caliper 250 drug discovery system. The 12-sipper Off-Chip Mobility Shift chip is designed to increase throughput, while the 4-sipper On-Chip Mobility Shift assay is designed to simplify drug discovery screening assays for a number of target classes, including kinases.

• Corautus Genetics Inc., of San Diego, converted all 5,830 outstanding shares of Series A preferred stock into 5.83 million common shares before a reverse stock split, or 832,857 shares after the split. The company's previously announced 1-for-7 reverse stock split, effective March 10, will give Corautus about 9.87 million common shares issued and outstanding, down from about 69.1 million. No fractional shares will be issued as a result, but Corautus will pay cash to each stockholder in lieu of fractional shares. Corautus was formed by the merger of GenStar Therapeutics Corp., of San Diego, and Vascular Genetics Inc., of Atlanta.

• Dyax Corp., of Cambridge, Mass., said the oral presentation of interim Phase II data from an open-label trial to evaluate the company's kallikrein inhibitor, DX-88, for the treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE) were presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in Denver. The abstract concluded that specific inhibition of plasma kallikrein activity by DX-88 might be effective in treating acute symptoms in patients with HAE.

• Elusys Therapeutics Inc., of Pine Brook, N.J., received from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., a $1.2 million grant to support development of a drug to protect people at risk of serious complications from the smallpox vaccine. Specifically, the two-year grant will allow Elusys to identify and study in mice at least one drug that will be a candidate for studies against vaccinia complications in immunocompromised primates. Vaccinia virus is related to smallpox and is the active component of the vaccine.

• Fluidigm Corp., of South San Francisco, released a protein crystallization system enabling free interface diffusion. Fluidigm based its Topaz Crystallizer on disposable fluidic microprocessors with pneumatically actuated valves that control the allocation and interaction of the nano volumes of reagent and protein solutions used in the crystallization process.

• Forest Laboratories Inc., of New York, reported the results of a study that showed no pharmacokinetic interactions between memantine, an investigational drug for Alzheimer's disease, and donepezil (Aricept), an approved drug for the treatment of mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. Researchers presented data at the American Medical Directors Association annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., last week. The study involved 24 healthy subjects.

• Gene Logic Inc., of Gaithersburg, Md., released at the Society of Toxicology meeting in Salt Lake City, an expansion of its ToxExpress toxicogenomics solutions. The company launched its Molecular Mechanism of Toxicity service as part of its toxicogenomics program, which consists of a range of gene expression-based products and services for toxicogenomic analysis.

• ID Biomedical Corp., of Vancouver, British Columbia, said it developed technology to manufacture protein antigens. ID said the recombinant protein cloning and expression system, referred to as ID-CX5, has been used to produce large quantities of purified proteins. Proteins produced from the platform have been integrated into its Phase II trial of StreptAvax.

• Ingenium Pharmaceuticals AG, of Munich, Germany, and the Institute for Animal Development and Molecular Biology of the Heinrich-Heine-University Dusseldorf reported a collaboration in which Ingenium will develop animal models with defined gene alterations. The focus of the collaboration will be genes relating to limb development and neurogenesis. Financial terms were not disclosed.

• Medicis Pharmaceutical Corp., of Scottsdale, Ariz., closed its previously announced acquisition of all outstanding shares of HA North American Sales AB, a unit of the Q-Med Group, of Uppsala, Sweden. Medicis will acquire all of its outstanding shares for about $160 million, with $58.2 million paid upon closing. HA North American holds a license for the exclusive U.S. and Canadian rights to market, distribute and commercialize a number of dermal filler product lines, including Restylane and Perlane - products sold in more than 60 countries by Q-Med, but not yet approved in the U.S. Medicis will pay an additional $53.3 million upon FDA approval of Restylane, $19.4 million upon certain cumulative commercial milestones and $29.1 million upon FDA approval of Perlane.

• Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., said the FDA accepted and designated for priority review Millennium's new drug application for Velcade for relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma. The application for Velcade, which was granted the FDA's fast-track status in June, was based primarily upon the results of the Phase II SUMMIT trial, a multicenter study of 202 patents with relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma. (See BioWorld Today, Jan. 23, 2003.)

• Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Boulder, Colo., said it would hold a special stockholder meeting next month, at which time its stockholders will be asked to approve the previously announced proposed sale of $48 million in common stock and warrants to a number of private venture firms. The stockholders also will be asked to approve other matters including a reverse stock split, a name change and an increase in shares authorized for option issuances and employee benefit programs. (See BioWorld Today, Feb. 13, 2003.)

• Ricerca Biosciences LLC, of Concord, Ohio, entered a strategic partnership with PrimaScreen Inc., of Columbia, Md., designed to enhance its ADME/toxicology and metabolite identification capabilities, by combining it with PrimaScreen's Validated Humanized Discovery toxicological assay platform. The partnership was reported at the 42nd annual meeting of the Society of Toxicology in Salt Lake City.

• Viragen Inc., of Plantation, Fla., and Viragen International Inc., reported the approval of its natural human alpha interferon for sale in South Africa. The South African regulatory authorities approved an application filed by Viragen's distribution partner in that country, Key Oncologics Inc., of Sandton, South Africa. Financial terms were not disclosed.

• XenoPort Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., received a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The grant provides XenoPort with $1.2 million over a two-year period. It supports development of new methods for identifying transcytosis pathways and the discovery of ligands capable of engaging these pathways to improve the oral absorption of certain drugs.