• DeltaDOT Ltd., of London entered a collaboration with Procter and Gamble Pharmaceuticals, of Cincinnati, for the further development of DeltaDOT's proteomics technology platform. The collaboration will be in two stages - refining and tuning the high-throughput system to meet industrial standards, and commercializing the technology and customizing it for different applications. Procter and Gamble will become a user. DeltaDOT was spun out of Imperial College, London, in 2000.

• Maybridge Chemical Holdings plc, of Tintagel, UK, was acquired by the U.S. research equipment and services company, Fisher Scientific Inc., of Hampton, N.H. Maybridge is a drug discovery services company specializing in the production of organic compounds for high-throughput screening and combinatorial chemistry. At the same time Fisher said it also acquired Mimotopes Pty., an Australian manufacturer of custom peptides. The total purchase price for both was US$55 million.

• MindSense Biosystems Ltd., of Rehovot, Israel, closed its offices after failing to raise enough money to continue operating. In May 2001, MindSense had secured a US$2 million investment from Future Capital AG, of Frankfurt, Germany, initiating the company's third round of financing aimed at raising an additional US$10 million. The round was never completed, and the company's existing investors declined to inject additional capital. Earlier, MindSense had raised US$7.5 million from Israeli and foreign investors, including Biomedical Investments Ltd. and Mezam Capital Funds Management, both in Tel Aviv; Shamrock Holdings, of California; and the Comsor Investment Fund. CEO Nir Nimrodi, who helped found the start-up late in 1996 to develop a kit for diagnosis and monitoring of mental disorders, based on the discovery of key biomarker proteins in blood, regretted the politically inflamed and financially depressed climate in Israel that failed to support such technologies.

• Oxford BioMedica plc, of Oxford, UK, was awarded a US$500,000 grant by the U.S. charity Andrew's Buddies/Fight Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), to support its motor neuron disease program. SMA is a childhood form of motor neuron disease, caused by a defect in the SMN-1 gene. Oxford BioMedica plans to use its LentiVector delivery system to replace the defective gene. The product is in preclinical development. The company retains all commercial rights and said it will have a clinical-stage product in two years.

• Paradigm Therapeutics Ltd., of Cambridge, UK, and Medivir AB, of Huddinge, Sweden, agreed to a three-year research collaboration under which Paradigm will apply its drug discovery technologies to identify novel protease targets and develop small-molecule inhibitors. The partners intend to identify and validate up to six novel proteases as targets. Paradigm, which recently completed a £million (US$19.3 million) private funding round, uses transgenic mice to define the physiological function of novel genes.

• Pharmagene plc, of Royston, UK, made a deal with Schering-Plough Research Institute, of Kenilworth, N.J., for access to Pharmagene's Target Evaluator database. Under the terms of the two-year agreement, SPRI will have access to the database and will also be able to nominate genes for profiling in diseased human tissues in a range of disorders. Terms were not disclosed. Target Evaluator contains information on gene expression profiles in healthy and diseased human tissues.