Company Announcements

Kyoto University, iPS Academia Japan and iPierian entered into intellectual property agreements in February that create a unified patent estate covering induced pluripotent stem cell technology.

In March, Life Technologies’ StemPro MSC (mesenchymal stem cells) SFM (serum-free medium) stem cell culture medium received FDA 501(k) clearance, which is required for researchers involved in US clinical trials.

In March, DNA2.0 named Dr. Jeremy Minshull CEO.

Life Technologies will sell Gen-Probe Life Sciences’ Elucigene QST*R Aneuploidy Kits under the Applied Biosystems brand in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Canada. The kits are labeled for diagnostic use and are used with the Applied Biosystems capillary electrophoresis systems.

AMSBIO opened a North American subsidiary in Orange County, California, in March.

LI-COR Biosciences announced a collaboration with MitoSciences to create specific assays for disease and metabolic pathways research.

Biotix raised $2 million in a $4 million Series B equity financing round, according to an April SEC filing.

Promega announced its expansion into Brazil in April.

BioTime acquired Glycosan BioSystems, a supplier of biocompatible hydrogels, in April.

Product Introductions

In March, Affymetrix released the SNP 6 Core Reagent Kit of premixed and validated reagents.

In March, PerkinElmer expanded its epigenetic detection reagents to cover nine different histone marks as well as protein 53, with over 15 validated enzyme assays.

EMD Millipore introduced the Millicell µ-Migration Assay Kit for studying chemotaxis. It is a slide-based micro-channel platform. Up to three assays can be run in parallel on each slide with 100–200 cells per assay.

Promega launched the QuantiFluor dsDNA System for double-stranded DNA quantification.

In March, Bioo Scientific released the NEXTflex PCR-Free DNA Sequencing Kit, which eliminates the need for amplification during library preparation. It can be used with the Illumina GAII and HiSeq 2000/1000 platforms.

Clontech Laboratories introduced the SMARTer Ultra Low RNA Kit for Illumina Sequencing, which facilitates transcriptome analysis from as little as 100 pg of RNA.

HTG Molecular Diagnostics released qFix Arrays for gene expression analysis.

New England BioLabs launched the EpiMark Methylated DNA Enrichment Kit. Developed with Sequenom, it utilizes methyl-CPG-immunoprecipitation.

SwitchGear Genomics introduced the Synthetic mi­RNA Target GoClone luciferase reporters for measuring the activity of specific miRNAs in cells.