Novartis Venture Fund Supporting Start-ups

The Novartis Venture Fund, which has around 100 million Swiss francs($67.9 million) available, is now supporting 23 start-up companies in the biomedical/bioinformatics arena. By end-1997, its says, it had received 120 formal proposals, 60 of which underwent in-depth appraisal. Representatives of three of the projects supported by the fund from Kinetix Pharmaceuticals in the USA and GeneData AG and Modex Therapeutics, both of Switzerland, introduced their companies and achievements at a Novartis press conference.