Scottish bioinformatics firm goes south
bioinformatics software has been sold to QbioCom, a rival firm
based in England, for £1 million.
The Edinburgh University spin-out, formerly known as Edinburgh Biocomputing Systems, had been struggling for survival after failing to win the contracts it needed for its Causeway and MPSRCH sequence analysis software packages.
The latest product, Causeway, is designed to provide speedier sequence analysis results than can be achieved with the widely-used BLAST utility for comparing gene and protein sequences against others in public databases, developed by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Both products sit well with QbioCom's own activities, which lie in software for the annotation or identification of nucleic acid and amino acid sequences and the development of proprietary sequence databases.
Aneda was riding high in the late 1990s after signing a $20 million (€15.8m) licensing deal with Oxford Molecular, but saw its best customer disappear when the latter subsequently sold off its drug discovery activities to Pharmacopeia and was absorbed into Accelrys. Last year Aneda's turnover had slumped to just £100,000.
