While on a seafaring expedition that was part of ongoing environmental genetics work, scientist J Craig Venter and his crew were suddenly engulfed in a sand storm -- 2880 kilometres from the coast of Africa.

Within the next five years, pharmacogenomics will take stronger hold in medicine, with genetics becoming more key to drug development and providers moving toward a more personalised approach to healthcare, a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official has predicted.

"I have frequently said that RNA interference, as far as I'm concerned, is the most important discovery of the past decade," says MIT's Phillip Sharp. As co-founder of Biogen Idec and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and Nobel laureate for his discovery of gene splicing, Sharp knows of what he speaks.

Drug company Genentech posted net income of US$206.6 million, or $0.19 earnings per share, in the fourth quarter of 2004, up from $126.7 million or $0.12 per share in the comparable period of 2003.

Safi Bahcall knows a thing or two about managing change. In August of 2002 he led a merger buyout that transformed Synta Pharmaceutical Corp from being the US subsidiary of a Japanese company to a fully independent drug discovery and development business whose number of employees doubled in just over a year.

IBM and the giant Mayo Clinic are teaming on a broad technology initiative aimed at speeding IT advances related to patient care and medical research that for the first time uses the Blue Gene supercomputer for one of its original stated aims -- large-scale mathematical modelling to better understand gene and protein structures and how they interact.

Molecular pathways ought to be the "next wave" in the genome project because they hold the key to understanding how diseases are set off, take hold and can be treated, according to Dr Mark Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research.

Medical researchers must accelerate the pace of discoveries, make better use of all types of data, and collaborate more across disciplines, Dr Elias Zerhouni, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), has urged.

Applera has reorganised its Applied Biosystems Group into four new business divisions and also announced plans to trim 145 jobs in the first quarter of fiscal year 2005, the company has revealed.

The first draft of the dog genome sequence is now available in free public databases for researchers to access and use, the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has announced.

Invitrogen has opened a biosecurity subsidiary in the US state of Maryland, that will focus on research and product development, including detection systems and vaccines, related to pathogens that naturally cause disease but that also could be used by terrorists.