Yeast yield

Merck is to pay $400 million for a privately held biotechnology firm that improves drugs by fine-tuning their sugar structures. GlycoFi of Lebanon, New Hampshire, has developed technology that uses specially engineered yeasts to attach sugars to proteins with high accuracy. About 70% of drugs are proteins with sugars attached. GlycoFi was founded in 2000 and built up with $35 million from venture-capital groups such as Polaris Venture Partners and SV Life Sciences. It will now become a wholly based subsidiary of New Jersey-based Merck.

No concorde

Both Boeing and NASA have emphatically denied that they are planning talks with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on the joint development of a supersonic passenger plane. Officials in Japan had told newspapers there that they were hoping to meet with the Americans to discuss such a project, with a view to boosting innovation in their domestic aerospace industry. Japan already has a small, exploratory collaboration with France on supersonic airliners.

VaxGen setback

Shares in California vaccine supplier VaxGen plunged by more than a third when it admitted it will be nearly two years late delivering 75 million doses of its recombinant anthrax vaccine to the US government. Under the terms of its $878-million contract, which is part of Project BioShield, the company won't be paid until it delivers the vaccine. It now says that won't happen before late 2007 at the earliest, and it blames the delay on the government demanding more trials of the vaccine's safety and efficacy.