Teddington, UK 2/16/18; Middleton, WI 2/16/18—LGC has purchased Lucigen, which manufactures and sells molecular biology enzymes, reagents and kits. Based in Wisconsin, Lucigen has more than 65 employees. “Lucigen has tremendous assets including its highly skilled and motivated workforce, enzyme and kit development capabilities, complemented by ISO 13485 manufacturing,” stated Brian Kim, president and managing director of LGC’s Genomics Division. “Lucigen’s assets are highly complementary to LGC’s capabilities, aligning squarely with our strategy to expand in the NGS and gene editing markets. We are excited to join forces and improve our offering to our molecular diagnostic, agbio, and biopharma customers.”

A spokesperson for LGC told IBO, “Lucigen has a reputation for offering high-performance competent cells which support basic and drug discovery research. More recently, Lucigen’s cells have become popular for synthetic biology and CRiSPR applications.” He added, “Lucigen’s best selling products are kits and reagents used in library preparation in NGS applications. Lucigen developed and manufactures the components for these kits, which are sold through a number of different channels.”

Asked about any overlap with LGC Genomics’ current offerings, he said, “LGC’s Genomics and Lucigen product offerings are generally complementary. The only overlap is in the area of amplification products.” He noted, “However, even in this area, Lucigen offers unique products that were not previously available from LGC and that could be considered synergistic with LGC’s Genomics offering. Lucigen also provides a number of products and kits used for isothermal amplification using Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP), a new application area for LGC.” 

Regarding Illumina’s Epicentre product line, which Lucigen exclusively distributes, the spokesperson told IBO, “Over the years, Epicentre Technologies built a customer base heavily focused on innovation, and its primary customer base was academic research labs. By acquiring these products through Lucigen, LGC’s Genomics division broadens its technology base, gains the ability to sell these products into its core industrial customer base, and also gains better access for its entire offering to the academic research market.”

According to Madison Wisconsin Business News, the company has approximately 70 employees, with $15 million in annual revenues.