Company Announcements

Cambridge Isotope Laboratories acquired the Spectra Stable Isotopes division of Spectra Gases, a subsidiary of Linde Gas, in July.

Cambridge Isotope Laboratories agreed to distribute CellFree Sciences’ WEPRO Expression Kits and reagents for cell-free protein production for NMR and MS applications in North America and Europe.

Anaspec licensed its HiLytePlus and HiLyte Fluor dyes to Novus Biologicals for labeling antibodies.

Anaspec named Biocore as an Australian distributor.

WaferGen signed exclusive distribution agreements for its SmartSlide Micro-Incubation Systems with Bucher Biotec AG in Switzerland, Unimed Healthcare in Taiwan and AH diagnostics AS in the Nordic region.

In July, Berry & Associates signed a five-year agreement with Applied Biosystems to supply a custom nucleoside phosphoramidite for use with the SOLiD system.

Itoham Foods sold Ito Life Sciences and its subsidiaries, American Peptide and Ito Life Sciences Shanghai, to Otsuka Chemical in September for approximately ¥1,700 million ($15.8 million). American Peptide Company’s revenues declined 5.9% to $14.3 million in fiscal 2008.

Invitrogen licensed an engineered stem cell line for the study of neural cells in neurodegenerative disease from the Buck Institute for Age Research.

Invitrogen and Lentigen partnered to develop and supply gene over-expression products and services, which Invitrogen will exclusively commercialize.

Carna Biosciences signed a collaborative agreement with Caliper Life Sciences in August to supply a set of discrete protein kinases.

Product Introductions

Illumina expanded its DASL Assay to whole-genome profiling and to focused expression and methylation profiling using the VeraCode platform.

Invitrogen introduced the JAK2 [pYpY1007/1008] phosphoELISA kit.

Applied Biosystems launched the SOLiD Small RNA Expression Kit for the simultaneous analysis of up to 256 biological samples in a single sequencing run.

Agilent released a kit to simplify the protocol for running miRNA profiling experiments on its microarrays.

Beckman Coulter released the Agencourt DNAdvance System, an extraction kit for DNA isolation and purification from mammalian tissue samples.

In August, ion channel services firm ChanTest launched a new business to provide validated ion channel expressing cell lines. Initially, nine cell lines will be released and a total of 64 will be available by the end of the year.

Promega introduced the PureYield Plasmid Miniprep System for purifying plasmid in less than 10 minutes from 600 µl to 3 ml of culture with fewer steps.