With cancer, heart disease, AIDS, hepatitis C and inflammatory devils such as rheumatoid arthritis tormenting the world populace, hardly anybody's losing sleep over insomnia. But most of those afflicted with the condition would pay dearly for a drug that would help them get shut-eye. About 85 million people in the U.S. suffer from sleep disorders, and the pharmaceutical information company IMS Health says the market in this country for prescription sleep products is almost $1 billion annually, and growing at a rate of about 30 percent per year. (BioWorld Financial Watch)

If the genomics revolution moved biotechnology out of test tubes and into computers, companies with their eyes on reasonably timed profits have been trying to move it back. But the best way to do that, say the organizers of the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C), is to make computers work better together. (BioWorld Financial Watch)