Nonlinear Dynamics (Newcastle, UK), a provider of bioinformatics solutions, and Waters (Milford, Massachusetts) reported in advance of the 4th HUPO annual world congress a co-development and co-marketing agreement. The agreement, described by the companies as a life science research partnership, creates an alliance within the proteomics market. Initially the two companies are to work together to promote the synergies between Nonlinear's Progenesis 2-D gel electrophoresis analysis solutions and Waters' ProteinLynx Global Server 2.2.5 protein mass-informatics system with its mass spectrometry systems for MALDI-MS/MS or ESI-MS/MS. The companies also declared their intention to work together on diverse areas of further development, including multivariate approaches to discovery research and orthogonal label-free protein quantification strategies.

SIRS-Lab (Jena, Germany) has entered into a collaboration agreement with Biosite (San Diego) for the evaluation and potential commercialization of sepsis markers. SIRS-Lab will provide access to selected biomarkers for sepsis. Biosite will then make antibodies to those selected targets using the company's antibody development process, which combines immunization of mice and phage display to generate diverse libraries of Omniclonal antibodies with high affinity and low cross-reactivity.