Company Announcements

Scientific Digital Imaging’s fiscal 2009 revenues for year ended April 30 increased 17.9% to £6.8 million ($11.1 million). Excluding AIM admission expenses and currency gains, operating profit rose 20.7% to £268,000 ($0.2 million) (see IBO 9/15/09). Synoptics, which includes the Syncroscopy, Synbiosis and Syngene brand names, made up 95% of sales. The UK, Europe, America and Asia accounted for 15%, 32%, 30% and 21% of sales, respectively.

Fluidigm named Química Valaner its exclusive Mexican distributor.

In September, Pacific Biosciences announced that it plans to release its SMRT DNA Sequencing System next year. It named Pat Brooks, formerly vice president of Sales for Affymetrix, vice president for North American Sales.

Gamma-Medica Ideas closed a $24 million financing, its first institutional round, in September. The round was led by Psilos Group.

Correlagen Diagnostics announced a scientific collaboration with Helicos BioSciences for optimizing methods of sample preparation for targeting resequencing and the purchase of a Helicos system.

The National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute awarded DNA sequencing technology grants: Helicos BioSciences received a two-year, $2.9 million grant; Pacific Biosciences received a $1.9 million grant; GE Global Research received a $1.3 million grant; and IBM received a $556,662 grant to develop a silicon-based “DNA Transistor”.

Product Introductions

Caliper Life Sciences launched the IVIS Lumina XR in vivo imaging system, which combines bioluminescence and fluorescence molecular optical imaging with co-registered digital X-ray images.

GE Healthcare released the Biacore X100 2.0 for single-cycle kinetics and X100 Plus Package 2.0 for calibration-free concentration analysis.

ART Advanced Research Technologies introduced the Optix MX3 Molecular Imaging System, a re-engineered and redesigned Optix platform with the ability to imaging red fluorescent proteins, Q-dots and complete spectrum from 450–850 nm.

Gelcompany launched a new horizontal High Performance Electrophoresis system, featuring a FlatTop Tower and four horizontal electrophoresis platforms in one system for use with 1D and 2D pre-cast gels.

Trophos SA launched the Plate RUNNER HD fluorescence fast plate imaging system for the imaging of the 7 mm well of a 96-well plate in matrices of up to 8192 x 8192 pixels.

Sofie Biosciences introduced the Genisys preclinical PET system.

In October, GE Healthcare launched the first imaging system codeveloped with FUJIFILM (see IBO 5/31/09).