Bayer AG, the German pharmaceutical company. Cancer is one of seven disease areas included in a five-year collaboration with Bayer that began in 1998. Under the terms of this collaboration, Millennium committed to provide Bayer with 225 novel drug targets, and will receive rights back to many of these targets over time. The most recent public statement of progress, in 2001, revealed that at that time, Millennium and Bayer had identified more than 140 disease-relevant drug targets, many of which moved into assay development and high-throughput screening; six projects were in lead optimization with structurally attractive compounds, and in four of these projects, disease efficacy had been shown in animals.

Becton Dickinson, a US-based diagnostics company. Millennium and Becton Dickinson have been collaborating to discover and develop cancer diagnostics. The goal of the collaboration agreement is to identify markers that will ultimately form the basis for new Diagnomic™ tests for various forms of cancer. Diagnomic tests are molecular diagnostics that can describe a patient's current medical condition and provide prognostic and therapeutic information.