St. Louis, MS and Richmond, CA 7/10/07—Sigma-Aldrich has licensed Sangamo BioSciences’ zinc finder DNA-binding proteins (ZFPs) for development of research reagents for the regulation of gene expression in living cells. Sigma-Aldrich also acquired rights to sublicense the technology for research applications. Sigma-Aldrich will initially pay Sangamo $13.75 million in the form of an upfront licensing […]

DeltaDOT appointed Richard Lingard as vice president of Sales. He was previously director of Strategic Alliances for Invitrogen. SRU Biosystems exclusively licensed Novartis’s Evanescent Resonance technology for drug discovery applications. The technology enables enhanced sensitivity to fluorescence-based assays. In April, Caliper Life Sciences named John DelliSanti executive vice president and chief commercial officer. He previously […]

According to a report by Marks & Clerk, a law firm specializing in intellectual property, advances in biotechnology are being driven by universities and public research institutes. The most biotech patent families—“groups of patents associated with a single invention”—filed in the period 2002–2006 was 1,022, by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, followed by the […]

Carlsbad and Mountain View, CA 5/29/07—Invitrogen and Clontech Laboratories, a unit of Takara Bio, have announced the settlement of Invitrogen’s patent infringement lawsuit against Clontech. The settlement comes one week after a jury decision in a federal district court in Maryland. According to the settlement, Clontech has agreed that Invitrogen’s four patents for “Cloned Genes […]

Idaho Technology exclusively licensed from the University of Utah Research Foundation the patent for “Monitoring Amplification with FRET Probes,” covering real-time PCR amplification kits. In February, QIAGEN NV broadened its portfolio of licenses to include all of Roche’s real-time PCR patents. The company also licensed patents related to Ortho Clinical Diagnostics’ “Hot-Start” technology. Sales for […]

Dr. Karen A. Holbrook, president of Ohio State University, joined Techne’s board in February. In February, BD Biosciences and Roche announced a collaboration to jointly identify and develop intracellular phosphorylation site antibodies. The companies will develop and validate the antibodies using BD Phosflow technology, and Roche will receive pre-launch access to the antibodies and a […]

San Diego, CA 3/13/07; Santa Clara, CA 3/13/07; San Diego, CA 3/1/07—A jury from the US District Court for the District of Delaware decided that Illumina infringed on, and induced infringement on, claims of five Affymetrix patents. The jury determined a proper royalty rate of 15% and awarded $16.7 million in damages to Affymetrix for […]

Company Announcements Beckman Coulter signed an OEM and supply agreement in fall 2006 to provide the Agencourt RNAClean nucleic acid purification product for packaging in NuGEN Technologies’ WT-Ovation Pico RNA Amplification System. Finnzymes Instruments licensed key thermal cycler and PCR patents from Applied Biosystems in fall 2006. In January, Finnzymes Instruments and Bridge Biosciences formed […]