Statistical review compiled from our Strategic Transactions database including financings by type (IPO, private placement etc.); financings by sector (surgical equipment, implantable devices, etc.); alliances by therapeutic category (cardiovascular, orthopedic, etc.); alliances by industry segment (biomaterials, monitoring equipment, etc. ); for three separate industries: medical devices, in vitro diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals/biotechnology.

Cypress Bioscience has reinvented itself in the past year to focus on the development of drugs for fibromyalgia syndrome, a mysterious disease characterized by pain and sleeplessness in the absence of measurable pathophysiological features.

Despite the in silico research ideals of many genomicists, no one has yet found a way around the basic requirement for using human tissue in gene expression studies-a broad array of it, well characterized, from healthy and diseased patients, and from world populations at large. That's why start-ups, drug discovery firms and others are creating a new resource: biorepositories--banks of tissue samples and data to serve the diagnostic, pharmaceutical and tissue engineering industries. As providers of services and products to research-based companies, these companies believe they are operating in a market that ranges from $500 million to $5 billion.

Genomics Collaborative Inc. looks like two distinct businesses: a functional genomics company in Cambridge, MA and a clinical research organization in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. But they are really two halves of a single drug discovery company, says Michael Pellini, MD, CEO; one that possesses the analytical tools for genetic association studies and biological analysis and the patient biological samples to back them up.