German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG said Thursday it will invest €100 million ($129 million) in a new global research and development center in Beijing over the next five years.

Curis, Inc., a drug development company seeking to develop next generation proprietary targeted medicines for cancer treatment, announced that Curis' collaborator Genentech, Inc. and the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD) are planning to enter into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) which will allow the NCI to explore GDC-0449, an orally-administered small molecule Hedgehog Pathway Inhibitor, in a number of cancer indications.

Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated and Trevena Inc. announced the initiation of a joint research and license alliance to screen targets using Trevena's novel biological platform against Ligand's combinatorial library of compounds, to identify active compounds with potential for development as novel G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) therapeutics.

Dyax Corp. announced that they have expanded their antibody funded research and library license agreement with Biogen Idec to include the discovery of additional antibody products identified using Dyax's proprietary drug discovery technology, phage display.