Microsoft Founders Invest in Firm Seeking AIDS Cure

Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founders of Microsoft Corp., have invested $10 million in a company that will use computers to find treatments for AIDS and cancer, officials at the company said Friday.

Darwin Molecular Corp. said the investment by the two software tycoons is the start of a major fund-raising effort for the biotechnology concern.

The investment represents the second major project on which Gates and Allen have joined forces this year.

In March they each invested $10 million in a Mobile Telecommunications Technologies Corp. project to develop a nationwide two-way personal communication system. Microsoft contributed an additional $30 million to that project.

While Allen stepped down from any daily role at Microsoft in 1983 after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, he has been extremely active in recent months with his own portfolio of companies, focusing heavily on applications for the information highway.

The biotechnology firm, based in suburban Bothell, Wash., said it plans to develop treatments for AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis through computer analysis of DNA sequence information, said Mark Pearson, president and chief executive officer of the company.

Pearson said Darwin was founded in 1992 with $2.8 million in seed money and is now in a second phase of private financing. He declined to say how much money the company hopes to raise.

Pearson said Gates and Allen were attracted to the biotechnology company through several personal connections, including work in molecular evolution done by Dr. Leroy Hood, a professor at the University of Washington who holds a chair endowed by Gates.

Gates also is a director of ICOS Corp., another Bothell-based biotechnology company whose chairman, George Rathmann, is a founder and director of Darwin.