Palo Alto biotech & Schering-Plough

More news on the bluring of the biotech/pharma line:

In the latest of several recent lucrative deals between Bay Area life-science companies and major drug makers, Anacor Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto said Friday that Schering-Plough has agreed to pay it up to $625 million for its toe-fungus treatment.

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Last month, Amgen of Thousand Oaks in Southern California agreed to a deal worth up to $725 million to help develop heart-failure treatments with Cytokinetics of South San Francisco. Since 2004, Amgen also has purchased three Bay Area companies -- Avidia of Mountain View, Abgenix of Fremont and Tularik of South San Francisco -- for a total of $3.88 billion.

In October, Merck of Whitehouse Station, N.J., announced it was paying $1.1 billion in cash for Sirna Therapeutics of San Francisco, which had been developing drugs to combat cancer, the virus that causes AIDS and other diseases.

And in August, GlaxoSmithKline of London announced it would pay up to $1.5 billion for the rights to treatments being developed by Mountain-View based ChemoCentryx for bowel and inflammatory disorders.