Entrepreneur Briefs

This computer dating service doesn't care about the color of your eyes, your favorite opera, or your search for a meaningful relationship. Money is its prime concern. Since 1984, not-for-profit Venture Capital Network has maintained a database that matches entrepreneurs seeking cash with investors hunting opportunity. For $100, entrepreneurs can include their business profiles in the VCN database for six months. Although the service can't guarantee an introduction to an investor, "almost everybody gets matched," says project director Helen Goodman, who notes that $5 million has changed hands as a result of the network. One satisfied customer is mechanical engineer Gary Malone of Malone Applied Technology, Rochester, N.H., whose firm's work in composite materials for the airline industry attracted $100,000 in backing. For more information on VCN, and a list of its 16 affiliates across the country, contact: Venture Capital Network Inc., P.O. Box 882, Durham, N.H. 03824, (603) 862-3556.

The biotech firm Applied Microbiology benefits from the research of over 100 scientists but pays only one-tenth of them. How does it manage this feat? Through its alliance with the Public Health Research Institute, an independent, not-for-profit lab in Manhattan. Applied Microbiology, founded in 1983 by businessman David Guttmann, has a 20-year, exclusive license agreement on any commercially viable research that comes out of the PHRI. Most recently, this has lead to the development of a bacteriocin that kills salmonella and has potential applications in many aspects of the food industry. Applied Microbiology's symbiotic relationship with the PHRI permits the.concern's eight scientists to work in the same building as the PHRI's 22 labs; in return, the PHRI receives some research funding from Applied as well as a small chunk of equity in the firm. (PHRI researchers, however, are forbidden from holding stock in Applied.)

Mauricio Pineda, professor of veterinary medicine at Iowa State University, has hit upon a novel way to ship cattle and swine embryos cross country: recruit the warm abdomens of mice. Pineda has developed a hydrogel chamber, about the size of a grain of wheat, that can be filled with embryos and then implanted in the peritoneal cavity of a mouse. The "pregnant" mouse then carries the embryos to their final destination where they are placed in a cow or sow to develop normally. During the trip, the embryos continue to grow, sustained by growth factors from their rodent host. This method is cheaper and more successful than the current strategy of cooling embryos to ultra-low temperatures before travel and then warming them upon arrival. The device is available for licensing. For information, contact: Steven C. Price, Biotechnology Industrial Liaison, Office of Biotechnology, 1010 Agronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011.