Despite a strong cash position of AUD$44.8 million, boosted by an interim net profit after tax of $23.9 million for the half-year ended 31 March 2005, Sydney biotech Peptech (ASX:PTD) has said it is "not actively participating in the M&A space" at the moment, and denied renewed speculation of a merger with Melbourne's Amrad (ASX:AMD).

"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.

Regenera (ASX:RGA) has signed deal with an affiliate of US opthamology giant Alcon, which one independent source has valued at US$100 million (AUD$130 million), for a steroid technology it licensed in only last year which is used in eye surgery.

Melbourne biopharma BioDiem (ASX:BDM) has entered the race to develop a treatment for the ophthalmic disorder, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), by taking a licence for a Russian-developed peptide therapeutic that has shown high promise in an Australian clinical trial.

Perth-based opthamology specialist Regenera (ASX:RGA) experienced a lacklustre debut on ASX today. After opening at $0.47 and trading as high as $0.50, it fell below its issue price and at time of writing was trading at $0.49.

Perth-based opthamology specialist Regenera has prevailed in an increasingly tough IPO market, closing its IPO today AUD$2 million oversubscribed, having raised in excess of AUD$10 million.

The CEO of Perth-based biotech Regenera, Tony Fitzgerald, said today that he expected the company’s offer to close next week, oversubscribed, ready for a June listing.

Apple Computer has outlined its strategy to win the hearts and minds of scientists, during a presentation to select attendees at the BioIT World Conference and Expo in Boston.

It's one thing to design a system that can allow a library of 100,000 compounds to be screened against a protein structure in a day to assess each compound's structural compatibility with the target site. It's another to offer a way to score or rank the compounds according to the best-predicted fit.

Blue Gene -- IBM's highly touted petaFLOP protein-folding supercomputer -- is still at least three years away from scheduled completion in 2006, but project managers say they have achieved some significant milestones. But will gains in other high-performance computing areas, notably clustering, make the system obsolete by the time it's ready to be unveiled?