Company Announcements

In June, BioForce Nanosciences named NanoAndMore a US distributor.

Cogenics, Roche’s 454 Life Sciences and Limagrain Verneuil entered into a collaborative agreement to develop solutions for large-scale crop SNP discovery, under which 454 will sequence 2GB of the wheat genome.

Caliper Life Sciences gained limited access to certain optical imaging technologies owned by biophotonics company Spectros.

Helicos BioSciences will collaborate with the Children’s Oncology Group, a cancer research cooperative, to interrogate genomic variation within various sarcomas.

Cell Biosciences named Tim Harkness, former CFO for Molecular Devices, as president and CEO in June.

GWC Technologies exclusively licensed a new “carbon-on-metal” surface technology from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

RainDance Technologies’ French subsidiary in Strasbourg, which is focused on securing research partnerships, will begin operations in September.

In July, Pacific Biosciences secured $100 million in a Series E private equity financing round to develop its SMRT (single-molecular, real-time) DNA sequencing platform. The round was led by Deerfield Capital Management and Intel Capital.

Promega and and France’s Biospace Lab will copromoste their respective imaging systems and reagents.

Product Introductions

Ambion, an Applied Biosystems company, introduced the Ambion MagMAX Express and Express-96 Magnetic Particle Processors.

NuSep launched the MF10 for fraction preparation, desalting and depletion of abundant proteins.

Millipore released the SNAP i.d. Protein Detection System for the fast production of Western blots.

Silicon Kinetics introduced the SKi Pro platform, based on optical interferometry, for biomolecular interaction analysis. The SKi Sensor biochips feature a 3-D nanoporous surface.

Alpha Innotech released the FluorChemQ Imaging System for chemiluminescent and fluorescent Western blot imaging and analysis.

In June, LI-COR Biosciences introduced the Pearl In Vivo Imaging System for small animal and whole-organ imaging, featuring dual-channel, NIR detection.

Bio-Rad Laboratories released the GLH Sensor Chip for small molecular applications for its ProteOn XPR36.

Bio-Rad introduced two Bio-Plex Pro Wash Stations for washing bead-based assays.

Caliper Life Sciences introduced the LabChip GX and GXII for automated 1-D electrophoretic separations, featuring the ability to analyze any single sample.

GE