Company Announcements

For the fiscal third quarter ending June 30, sales for Brooks Automation’s Life Science Systems (LSS) segment climbed 73.1% to $29.1 million to account for 20% of company sales (see IBO 7/31/16). Excluding the acquisition of BioStorage (see IBO 11/15/15), which added 73.8% to growth, and currency headwinds of 5.9%, organic sales grew 5.2%, including higher automation, consumables and service revenues. LSS operating loss narrowed 84.2% to $0.7 million due to the acquisition. Fiscal fourth quarter LSS sales are expected to climb roughly 13% sequentially to $33 million.

BMG Labtech announced in August a €4.5 million ($4.0 million) investment in a headquarters expansion. The new building will double the manufacturing area and provide new space for the warehouse, R&D and job growth. BMG has 110 employees.

In August, Thermo Fisher Scientific announced a strategic agreement with Hamilton Bonaduz under which Thermo Fisher will directly offer Hamilton automation instruments and consumables to its forensics customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and China.

In September, Brooks Life Science Systems announced a technology partnership to integrate Interactive Software’s Achiever Medical solution with its ISIDOR sample management informatics platform, adding patient and donor sample informed consent and clinical data management capabilities. In addition, Achiever Medical will be extended to include native integration with Brooks’ BioInsight sample intelligence dashboard tools, and automated stores, instruments and consumables. The new product, named BioStudies, is expected to be introduced in January 2017.

Product Introductions

FireflySci introduced in July 96-well plate adaptors and spectrophotometer calibration standards for all plate readers. Products include those that can calibrate for photometric accuracy, wavelength accuracy, fluorescence and luminescence. The standards can be mixed and matched on each plate.

In August, Azure Biosystems launched the Ao absorbance microplate reader, designed for ELISAs, nucleic acid quantification, protein quantification, enzyme kinetics and other colorimetric assays. It features an 8-position filter wheel, including 3 user-choice filters.

In September, M2 Scientifics and Lab Improvements introduced the CapTrack, a portable benchtop automation device for processing blood tubes that can automate up to 550 samples an hour. In the US, CapTrack is available exclusively from M2 Scientifics.