• Acambis plc, of Cambridge, UK, said pre-tax profits for the year ended Dec. 31 would be £12 million (US$21.9 million) lower than previous guidance as a result of a shipping delay of its ACAM2000 investigational smallpox vaccine for emergency use by the U.S. government. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta delayed its order because of a heightened security alert, rescheduling delivery for early next month. Consequently, pre-tax profits for this year are expected to be £12 million higher than previous guidance.

• Actelion Ltd., of Allschwil, Switzerland, and Cerep SA, of Paris, said Cerep will acquire the clinical development service organization Hesperion Ltd., of Basel, Switzerland. The transaction is valued at about CHF16.1 million (US$13 million) for 100 percent of outstanding shares. The transaction is expected to become final within the coming weeks. Actelion has a 70 percent stake in Hesperion, with the remaining outstanding shares owned by Hesperion management and employees.

• Chiron Corp., of Emeryville, Calif., initiated a Phase I trial in the U.S. for its HIV vaccine candidate. The trial, which is the result of a collaboration between the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., and Chiron, is testing a new generation of HIV vaccines that attempt to generate cellular immune response together with antibody response that will neutralize the virus. The vaccine is designed to prime the immune response by DNA immunization and then boost it with an oligomeric-engineered envelope protein to enhance the production of neutralizing antibodies. Separately, Chiron reported that the Procleix Ultrio Assay used for simultaneous detection of HIV Type I, hepatitis C virus and hepatitis B virus in donated blood now bears the CE mark.

• Crucell NV, of Leiden, the Netherlands, signed a nonexclusive PER.C6 technology research and commercialization license agreement with Biogen Idec Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., for the production of recombinant proteins to be used in in-house antibody discovery programs. Crucell will receive up-front and annual payments, as well as royalties on net sales of products discovered using the PER.C6 technology. Further financial details were not disclosed.

• Cytomatrix LLC, of Boston, secured a contract worth up to $1.7 million with the U.S. Department of Defense, which will use the company's T-cell production technology to screen vaccine prototypes under development. Cytomatrix's 3-D cell-growth scaffold is configured to produce T cells from stem cells outside the human body. The company is a subsidiary of CordLife Pte. Ltd., of Singapore.

• Diversa Corp., of San Diego, entered a collaborative agreement with DSM Pharma Chemicals, of Sittard, the Netherlands, to discover and develop biocatalytic solutions designed to simplify a variety of chemical transformations. DPC will identify targeted chemical conversions, and Diversa will work to develop appropriate biocatalysts. DPC then will scale-up those processes to manufacture pharmaceutical intermediates and active ingredients. Diversa will receive research and development payments and be entitled to milestones and royalties on products commercialized by DPC.

• Geron Corp., of Menlo Park, Calif., said the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a decision on motions filed in the proceeding between Geron and Infigen Inc., of DeForest, Wis. The decision upholds the patentability of all of Geron's claims and finds all of the Infigen claims to be unpatentable. The dispute centers on a patent application licensed to Geron from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, and an Infigen patent application. Both applications claim patent rights to animal-cloning technology.

• Hemosol Inc., of Toronto, said it has received a final receipt for its short-form prospectus from the Ontario Securities Commission on behalf of the securities commissions in Ontario and Alberta. The prospectus qualifies for distribution the common shares and warrants underlying Series A and B special warrants sold by way of a November private placement.

• Incyte Corp., of Palo Alto, Calif., signed a license agreement giving Roche Diagnostics, a division of F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., of Basel, Switzerland, permission to use its Eberwine Linear RNA Amplification technology in the development of diagnostics that identify gene-expression patterns unique in certain diseases or disease subtypes. The company expects Incyte's technology to complement Roche's polymerase chain reaction amplification technology in the development of a new generation of expression-based diagnostic products, it said. Financial arrangements were not disclosed.

• MacroPore Biosurgery Inc., of San Diego, was awarded a fast-track Phase I/II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., to study the role of adipose-derived regenerative cells in treating heart attacks. The studies, which are designed to evaluate the capacity of adipose-derived regenerative cells to improve revascularization and regenerate damaged myocardial tissue following a heart attack, will be conducted in collaboration with the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles.

• MWG Biotech AG, of Ebersberg, Germany, said a hydrogel electrophoresis purification process expands its synthetic nucleic acid portfolio. Highest purity oligonucleotides produced in the process open to customers a range of genomic applications, such as cloning and gene building, crystallography and mutagenesis and other applications requiring long- and short-mer oligonucleotides, the company said. The technology is designed to enable removal of all synthesis-failure products, n-x products and other impurities to achieve purity degrees of typically 99 percent.

• Pain Therapeutics Inc., of South San Francisco, initiated a Phase I trial of Remoxy, an abuse-resistant version of oxycodone, an opioid painkiller. Remoxy's capsule formulation is designed to foil drug abusers who attempt to inject, snort, crush, dilute, freeze or heat the drug. The Phase I will assess the safety, pharmacokinetics and pharmacological profile of the candidate against placebo and active drug in healthy volunteers in the UK. Assuming positive Phase I results, the company believes it remains on-track to initiate a Phase III program by the end of 2004.

• Peninsula Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Alameda, Calif., initiated patient enrollment in a Phase I trial of an inhaled formulation of its lead candidate, doripenem, a broad-spectrum carbapenem antibiotic. The privately held company previously released positive preclinical data from an in vitro study of doripenem in isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Burkholderia cepacia from patients with cystic fibrosis.

• QTL Biosystems LLC, of Santa Fe, N.M., released its QTL Lightspeed gamma-secretase assay kit, which uses a fluorescent, polyelectrolyte-based, super-quenching polymer. The company said the platform provides single-step, instantaneous homogenous assays and addresses a spectrum of drug targets in high-throughput screening.

• Samaritan Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Las Vegas, and Samaritan Research Labs, Georgetown University in Washington, said new research was published in the December issue of The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, a scientific journal of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. The research suggests that the inhibitory effects of procaine on cAMP-induced corticosteroid formation is due to the reduced synthesis of cholesterol. The researchers said elevated glucocorticoid levels are associated with many diseases, including age-related depression, hypertension, Alzheimer's disease and AIDS.

• Shimadzu Corp., of Kyoto, Japan, reported a worldwide OEM distribution agreement with Nonlinear Dynamics Ltd., a provider of bioinformatics software solutions. Shimadzu will distribute a dual-branded version, Shimadzu Phoretix, of a selection of Nonlinear's software solutions. The products are for the analysis and data mining of 2D and 1D electrophoresis gels used in proteomics and genomics research. Financial terms were not disclosed.

• Structural GenomiX Inc., of San Diego, expanded its research collaboration and technology transfer agreement with Eli Lilly and Co., of Indianapolis, to provide Lilly with long-term access to the SGX synchrotron beamline facility, SGX-CAT, to support Lilly's drug discovery programs. The SGX-CAT facility, built by SGX at the Advanced Photon Source at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, enables X-ray crystallography and protein-structure determination. The agreement requires SGX to generate crystal-structure data on Lilly drug targets and compounds, thereby satisfying the long-term data collection needs of Lilly. Lilly will pay SGX up-front access fees and annual operating costs, and retains the option to further expand its access to SGX-CAT in the future for additional payments. The original agreement was signed in April. Specific financial terms of the expanded agreement were not released. (See BioWorld Today, April 22, 2003.)

• Sunesis Pharmaceuticals Inc., of South San Francisco, and Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development LLC, of Raritan, N.J., extended a one-year research collaboration signed in May 2002 focused on the discovery of small-molecule enzyme inhibitors for the treatment of chronic diseases, including inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Financial terms provide Sunesis with research funding, research and development milestones, as well as royalty payments on the advancement and commercialization of small-molecule enzyme inhibitors based on an exclusive, worldwide license of products resulting from the collaborations. Specific terms were not disclosed. (See BioWorld Today, May 7, 2002.)

• Symyx Technologies Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., entered an agreement with Merck & Co. Inc., of Whitehouse Station, N.J., for the development and delivery of a Symyx Discovery Tools workflow. The workflow will extend Symyx's high-throughput technologies into the area of biocatalysts, with the development of a workflow that enables scientists to perform and analyze up to 400 automated enzyme reactions a day.

• Xcyte Therapies Inc., of Seattle, entered an agreement to transfer its Xcellerate technology to Fresenius Biotech GmbH, a division of Fresenius AG, of Bad Homburg, Germany, for a T cell-based gene therapy program for treating HIV infection. The agreement grants Fresenius an exclusive license to the technology in Europe for treating HIV/AIDS with gene-modified T cells, and provides Xcyte with milestone and royalty payments. The technology was designed for the activation, expansion and production of human T cells outside the body.

• Xenon Genetics Inc., of Vancouver, British Columbia, selected a clinical candidate from its metabolic syndrome program for formal preclinical development after achieving in vivo efficacy in multiple clinically relevant animal models. The findings showed that SCD1 regulates metabolic pathways such as those influencing weight and glucose. The company said it expects to advance the candidate into the clinic within about a year.