Company Announcements

In March, BioOptics closed a $3 million Series A financing round, led by Boulder Ventures. In conjunction, COO Richard Whitcomb was promoted to president and CEO.

In March, NextGen Sciences sold its electrophoresis business, consisting of the a2Deoptimizer automated gel casting unit and the optigels large-format precast gels, to Sigma-Aldrich for $560,000 in cash. In 2007, the business recorded revenues of $257,896.

In March, Seahorse Bioscience acquired BioProcessors and completed $6 million in financing. BioProcessors’ SimCell technology optimizes biologic drug manufacturing scale-up using plastic, microplate-sized cards, each with six small bioreactors.

Under a strategic alliance, the Translational Genomics Research Institute will use five of Applied Biosystems’ SOLiD 3 Systems to build a sequencing pipeline for patient-centric, medically directed resequencing.

Bionanomatrix received a $2.1 million Phase II Small Business Investment Research grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute to further develop its single-molecule nanoscale whole genome analyzer.

Pacific Biosciences announced in March that it has been named a senior party in a patent interference declared by the US Patent and Trademark Office with Life Technologies. The company stated that the interference relates to particular methods of single molecule DNA sequencing by incorporation. The patent in question, US Patent No. 7,329,492, was issued to Visigen Biotechnologies, which was acquired by Life Technologies (see IBO 10/31/08).

In March, VisualSonics announced it will market and sell Mauna Kea Technologies’ Cellvizio LAB in vivo imaging systems to preclinical researchers worldwide.

Helicos BioSciences announced that as of December 31, 2008, it had $19.7 million in cash and an accumulated deficit of $138.7 million. The company raised $18.6 million as a result of a December 2008 securities purchase agreement. Helicos expects existing cash and interest income to fund operations into the first quarter of 2010.

Product Introductions

Fluidigm Europe introduced the compact EP1 system for SNP genotyping studies as a rate of over 27,000 genotypes per day. It consists of the integrated fluid circuit controller, stand-alone thermal cycler and end-point reader.

Syngene launched the G:BOX iChemi range of chemiluminescent imaging systems, featuring four systems containing a high-resolution 16-bit CCD camera.

Sirius Analytical launched the SiriusT3 system for fully automated ionization, lipophilicity and solubility measurements.

Cambrige Research & Instrumentation released inForm software for its Nuance multispectral imaging system. InForm enables for the detection and quantification of multiple protein markers in a single tissue sample using conventional staining techniques.