This paper extends information economics to the literature on alliance partner selection by demonstrating how VCs can facilitate R&D collaborations. We investigate a new role for VCsinformation intermediation -that can enable R&D partnerships between entrepreneurial ventures that lack knowledge of each other's technological resources. In contrast to the more diffuse signaling benefits entrepreneurial ventures obtain by affiliating with prominent VCs, backing by a common VC can privately and directly reduce information asymmetries between entrepreneurial ventures. We demonstrate that the effects of VC information intermediation are more pronounced when prospective collaborators are at the earliest stages of product development and when they find it difficult to judge each other's technological resources, such as when they do not have previous partnerships together, do not draw upon each other's knowledge bases, and have dissimilar technology portfolios. We empirically investigate the multiple different ways in which VCs potentially facilitate R&D partner selection and identify specific conditions under which VCs' information intermediation function contributes to segmentation in markets for R&D alliances.

Alliance research emphasizes that firms can access research and development (R&D) collaboration opportunities when they enjoy relational or geographic embeddedness with potential partners. However, how can firms that are not embedded with prospective partners establish alliances? We emphasize the microfoundations of R&D alliance formation and propose that scientist mobility is an important substitutive mechanism that helps foster collaboration opportunities between firms that are poorly embedded. Specifically, we posit and show that in high-tech industries, scientist mobility is more facilitative for R&D alliance formation when potential partners lack relational ties between them or are not geographically colocated. Our findings demonstrate how incorporation of the competitive labor market context and its interplay with the cooperative context significantly changes the insights of a fundamental research stream emphasizing the importance of the cooperative context for alliance formation.

A sensitive and selective high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method was developed and validated for estimation of lamotrigine (CAS 84057-84-1) in human plasma and saliva. The chromatographic separation was achieved with a reversed phase column and a mobile phase consisting of acetonitrile and 20 mM ammonium acetate buffer pH 6.5 (30:70) with a flow rate of 1 mL/min. The calibration curve was linear within the working range for both plasma and saliva. The validated method has been successfully applied for a study of lamotrigine in human plasma and saliva to establish the correlation between these two matrices. A scatter plot of plasma versus salivary lamotrigine concentrations showed a gold linear relationship between them (Pearson correlation coefficient, r = 0.6832, p < 0.001).

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