Nutrigenomics could be used to help solve the growing obesity crisis.

CSIRO Plant Industry and NZ's AgResearch are putting their heads together.

When Merck announced last year it was buying Sirna Therapeutics for over US$1 billion, the world sat up and took notice. RNAi was now being seen as not only a revolution in our understanding but something with an unimaginable dollar value as well.

AgResearch, the largest of New Zealand's crown research institutes, has formed a new company with San Diego venture capital firm Finistere Partners, to commercialise its plant genome technology in the US.

US-listed Innovate Oncology and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Avantogen (ASX:ACU), formerly Australian Cancer Technologies, are to merge.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw spoke with Melissa Trudinger about ways in which India and Australia can work together in biotech.

Mutual fatigue, and the peculiar challenges involved in negotiating with New Zealand's research and health-service agencies, were behind the mediated settlement of the Auckland District Health Board's dispute with Melbourne biotech Genetic Technologies (ASX:GTG) over licensing fees for GTG's non-coding DNA gene testing and mapping technology in NZ.

Australia and New Zealand research and funding agencies are joining hands across the Tasman for a major genomics project on the animal on which both nations' economies were founded -- the sheep.

When Diana Hill went looking for significant new commercial opportunities in New Zealand's meat industry, she decided she'd better get down and dirty, so she spent a month in a meat processing plant asking where the hell the next billion dollar business was.

New Zealand Crown Research Institute AgResearch is selling off its wholly owned subsidiary, sheep vaccine distributor AgVax, under its policy of divesting itself of its profitable start-ups.