Company Announcements

A settlement agreement was announced in August in GE Healthcare’s 2010 German suit against Bio-Rad Laboratories for infringement of surface plasmon resonance–related patents. As part of the agreement, GE granted Bio-Rad access to a collection of its patents.

Scientific Digital Imaging named Finance Director Mike Creedon acting managing director in August.

Helicos Biosciences announced in September the resignation of Board member Brian Atwood.

In September, DNA sequencer developer NABsys closed a $10 million venture capital round of Series C Preferred Stock financing, bringing its total funding raised since April 2009 to more than $21 million.

Roche signed an open-innovation agreement with Swedish life science initiative Uppsala BIO for the development of life science products.

Quanterix named Chairman Martin D. Madaus, PhD, CEO in September. He is the former chairman and CEO of Millipore.

Pacific Biosciences partnered with Cycle Computing to optimize the PacBio RS SMRT Analysis software for cloud computing.

In September, Attana agreed to distribute, with its QCM biosensors, Layerlab’s memLAYER chemistry kit for immobilizing biological membranes to biosensor surfaces.

As part of the newly formed African Orphan Crops consortium, Life Technologies will provide technology to the Ghana-based African Plant Breeding Academy, which will be established in 2012. The consortium plans to sequence the genomes of 24 food crops and tree species.

BioScale named Riccardo Pigliucci, former CEO of Discovery Partners, to its Board in September. He replaces Dr. Paul Billings.

Under a license and collaboration agreement, Advanced Liquid Logic gained exclusive access to CEA-Leti’s patents for digital microfludics. Advanced Liquid Logic also set up a subsidiary company in France.

Product Introductions

In September, Carestream Molecular Imaging introduced the Gel Logic 6000 PRO for imaging gels, blots and plates using multiple modalities including chemiluminescence, UV and multiwavelength fluorescence, and radioisotopic labels. New software allows the capture, overlay and analysis of data from up to four individual layers within an image.

Siemens Healthcare Molecular Imaging released the Inveon Research Workplace 4.0 image visualization and analysis software package for preclinical imaging, featuring the new Application Programmable Extension Toolkit. Also released was the Inveon Viewer software.

NanoString launched in September the miRGE Assay for the simultaneous measurement of miRNA and mRNA expression levels in a single tube without amplification.