Venture capital firms used to moan that business angels were unprofessional and hard to work with. But Europe's new breed of angel investor networks appears anything but that, says Mary Lisbeth D'Amico

Researchers at the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey recently reported that they have shown and observed a phenomenon called negative differential resistance - holding out the prospect of a new generation of cheap and fast semiconductors.

Micromet AG, a spin-off from the Institute for Immunology at Munich University, said it has agreed to grant four licenses of its single chain antibody technology to Abbott Laboratories, Alligator Bioscience AB, Haptogen Ltd. and an unnamed biopharmaceutical company, for the development of cancer treatments.

Lipoxen Plc, a drug spin-out company from the University of London's School of Pharmacy, said it has raised £3.78 million from a placing of 28 million shares for hiring news staff for preclinical trials to treat diabetes, Pneumococcal infections, and hepatitis C.