Company Announcements

Genetix’s first-half revenues grew 13.7% to £14.1 million ($20.9 million). Operating profit rose 59.7% to £1.2 million ($1.8 million) (see IBO 8/31/09). Sales for the clinical instrument business grew 12% to £4.8 million ($7.1 million), cell biology sales rose 20% to £4.0 million ($5.9 million), genomics-based instrument sales increased 17% to £2.1 million ($3.1 million) and recurring revenue increased 20% to £3.1 million ($4.6 million). US revenue rose 8% (down 17% on a constant-currency basis) to account for 42% of sales, European revenue grew 2% to 35% of revenue and rest of world revenue rose 59% (up 40%).

Robotic Technology Systems Life Science’s six-month sales grew 69.9% to £4.2 million ($6.2 million) due to strong service and support revenues. Operating profit for Life Science was £352,000 ($1.5 million), compared to a loss of £94,000 ($1.8 million) a year ago (see IBO 8/31/09).

Hamilton Robotics and Promega collaborated to develop an automated system for the isolation of genomic DNA from large-volume blood samples.

Rigaku Americas is offering TTP LabTech’s mosquito nanoliter pipetting system as part of its CrystalMation platform for protein crystallization experiments.

Agilent partnered with V&P Scientific in September for custom Pintool heads for its Agilent Automation Solutions liquid handlers for transfer of 3–5000 nL of liquid.

Labcyte selected Bioscreen Instruments as it exclusive distributor for India.

In November, Hercules Technology Growth Capital committed to providing $5.5 million in credit facilities to LabCyte.

Tecan and Waters are comarketing an automated sample preparation system for the analysis of amino acids.

Symyx Technologies named John Senaldi senior vice president and president of High Productivity Research. He was most recently division manager of the Protein Function Division at Bio-Rad Laboratories.

Product Introductions

Trinean introduced the DropSense 96 multichannel microplate reader for UV-VIS analysis of microliter droplets of DNA/RNA, proteins or small compounds using DropPlate16/96 chips. It requires a sample volume of 1–2.5 µL.

Beckman Coulter released four new detection cartridges for its PARADIGM Detection Platform modular plate reader: AlphaScreen, GeneBLAzer, MultiTox-Fluor and Fluorescence Intensity Detection.

PerkinElmer expanded its EnSpire Multilabel Plate Reader platform, adding luminescence capability.

Digilab introduced the ProPrep-LC Automated Protein Digestion Workstation for the automation of in-gel and in-solution protein digestion.

TTP LabTech launched the mosquito LCP for automated lipidic cubic phase crystallization screening set-up.