Reed Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch publisher, is investing $5m in Inpharmatica, a UK biotechnology company. The investment, although small for a company with revenues of £1bn ($1.85bn), takes the world's largest publisher of scientific journals into the emerging field of bioinformatics, the use of powerful computer technology to work out the relationship between the genome, proteins and the design of new drugs.

Inpharmatica is a drug discovery company working on reproductive health, diabetes, atherosclerosis, cancer and inflammation. But it has turned its drug discovery software into a product called PharmaCarta that earns it $10m a year from other companies, including some of the largest pharmaceutical companies.