* Cepheid, of Santa Clara, Calif., has received $3.1 million from individual investors in a self-managed first round of funding. This private funding is in addition to a $1.7 million two-year contract from the Department of Defense Edgewood Research, Development and Engineering Center, of Edgewood, Md., to design, develop and build a fully automated DNA analysis system.

* First Medical Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., and Duke University Medical Center's Division of Cardiology, of Durham, N.C., have signed an agreement granting First Medical an exclusive license to a clinical decision-making tool for assessing the effectiveness of thrombolytic therapy. The agreement includes an option to subsequent improvements in the same field. First Medical's technology combined with Duke's assessment algorithm tool will provide a non-invasive method for detecting the success of thrombolytic drugs in dissolving the blood clots in a patient who has had an acute myocardial infarction.

* Nanogen Inc., of San Diego, and Becton, Dickinson and Co., of Franklin Lakes, N.J., have entered into a worldwide, multi-year collaborative agreement to develop test systems to diagnose infectious disease. The diagnostic test will be based on Nanogen's DNA micro-chip and instrumentation technology and Becton Dickinson's system for DNA amplification. Financial terms were not disclosed.

* Pharmacyclics Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., reported interim results of a Phase Ib/II clinical trial of its radiation sensitizer, gadolinium texaphyrin (Gd-Tex), for the treatment of brain metastases demonstrated Gd-Tex was well tolerated. The tumor selectivity and the observed tumor response rate was promising, the company said. No serious drug-related toxicities were recorded. Gd-Tex, one of a group of synthetic molecules called texaphyrins, captures and focuses medically useful forms of energy such as X-rays.

* Sonus Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Bothell, Wash., and MedSim Ltd., of Kfar-Sava, Israel, and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., have signed an agreement to develop and evaluate an UltraSim simulation training system for contrast agents to aid in training physicians on the use of EchoGen in echocardiography. EchoGen is Sonus' ultrasound contrast agent currently pending approval in the U.S. and Europe. UltraSim is MedSim's ultrasound simulation trainer for teaching medical ultrasound procedures and scanning techniques.