Breathe easier

Tobacco giant Philip Morris has embarked on a business alliance aimed at helping premature babies to breathe. The company, based in Richmond, Virginia, has joined up with Discovery Laboratories of Warrington, Pennsylvania, which makes an artificial surfactant — a protein-lipid substance produced in the lungs that is critical for breathing, but often missing from babies who are born more than a month premature. Philip Morris will use its proprietary aerosol technology to develop a device that will deliver the surfactant deep into the lungs.

Virgin territory

Plans have been unveiled for a US$200-million private spaceport to be built near Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 2007. The state's economic development office says it has agreed tenancy terms for the project with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which intends to put its headquarters there and use the facility as a launch site for space tourists. Virgin says 100 people have already paid $200,000 a ticket for suborbital jaunts on a vehicle to be built by California-based Scaled Composites, which won last year's X Prize for sending a privately developed vehicle to the edge of space.

Biotech fights back

The US Biotechnology Industry Organization is spearheading a drive to shield small businesses from the requirements of a corporate ethics law that it says is too cumbersome for its member companies. Jim Greenwood, the former Pennsylvania congressman who is now the organization's president, is leading the push to relax the Sarbanes-Oxley law. The 2002 law tightened corporate accountability in response to accounting scandals surrounding the energy conglomerate Enron and other US corporations. Greenwood backed the bill when in Congress.