Company Announcements

Tecan inaugurated in the spring Tecan Australia.

Tecan announced in June a comarketing agreement with Reinnervate to develop automated solutions based on their respective Freedom EVO liquid handling workstations and Alvetex Scaffold 2D cell culture technology.

Tecan announced in September the intent to comarket a new automated low-volume, high-sensitivity microfluidic ELISA based on its Freedom EVO liquid handling technology and Siloam Biosciences’ OptiMax microplate for chemifluorescence-based ELISA using a 5 µL sample.

In May, Brooks Automation named Ellen M. Zane, who recently retired as the president and CEO of Tufts Medical Center and Floating Hospital for Children, to its Board.

TTP Labtech announced that 2011 sales grew 5%, with a 16% increase in product sales, a 14% increase in consumables revenue and a 7% increase in Asian sales.

CyBio shares are no longer traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, effective August 25 (see IBO 1/31/12).

Corning Life Sciences announced in June a collaboration agreement, under which TAP Biosystems will develop an automated system capable of manipulating up to four Corning HYPER Stack-120 Cell Culture Vessels simultaneously for high-throughput manufacturing.

Life Technologies signed a collaboration and comarketing agreement in July with Douglas Scientific for high-throughput genotyping applications, leveraging their respective TaqMan Assays and Array Tape platform.

In July, EnviroLogix signed a collaborative agreement with Douglas Scientific to develop and optimize solutions for real-time and endpoint nucleic acid analysis based upon their respective DNAble v2.0 chemistry and Array Tape platform.

Product Introductions

BioTek Instruments released in May the 405 LS Series Microplate Washer.

BioTek Instruments launched the BioStack3 Microplate Stacker, featuring a dual-plate carrier and rotational wrist, with a total transfer time of less than 10 seconds.

In May, BioTek Instruments introduced the Synergy NEO HTS Multi-Mode Microplate Reader, which combines filter-based and monochromator-based systems. It is tailored for smaller cell-based screening assays.

Gilson launched in May the GX-241 Liquid Handler, which is initially introduced as a liquid handler and autosampler and features an injection volume range of 20 µL to 5 mL.

Berthold Technologies launched in July the second-generation multilabel TriStar2 microplate reader, which is designed for luminescence, fluorescence and absorbance measurements and can read FRET, BRET and BRET2.

In August, PerkinElmer introduced its first 96-well cellular label-free assay plate for the EnSpire Label-Free Multimode Plate Reader platform.