Guildford, UK 6/26/09; London, UK 6/26/09—IDBS, a provider of data management solutions, has agreed to acquire InforSense for £5 million ($8.2 million = £0.61 = $1 ) in cash. InforSense supplies integration technologies and web-based interactive analytics. “This is a major enabling step towards becoming the number one informatics partner of R&D worldwide,” commented Neil […]

Chalfont St. Giles, England and Menlo Park, CA 6/30/09; Cambridgeshire, UK 6/25/09—GE Healthcare has entered into an exclusive license and alliance agreement with biopharmaceutical firm Geron to develop and commercialize cellular assay products derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) for use in drug discovery, development and toxicity screening. GE has licensed Geron’s intellectual property […]

Bridgewater, NJ 6/30/09; Carlsbad, CA 6/30/09—LabVantage Solutions, developer of the SAPPHIRE LIMS, has agreed to acquire the SQL*LIMS business from Applied Biosystems, a unit of Life Technologies, for an undisclosed amount. The SQL*LIMS is an enterprise LIMS. LabVantage will continue to support SQL*LIMS product and customers. “While the LIMS business is an important asset for […]

GE Healthcare and Geron announced this week that they are partnering to offer human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-derived assays for drug development and screening toxicity (see page 2). HESC-derived cell-based assays promise to supplement in vivo animal and in vitro cell testing for drug development. Applications could include target identification and validation, screening of compound […]

Microfluidics is not only useful in applications ranging from process chemistry to cell sorting, but is also a way to enter an established instrument market. Formulatrix began as a provider of the Rock Maker protein crystallography imaging system. The company has had 60% average growth in revenue since its start in 2002. It entered the […]

Over the past few months, the Department of Energy (DOE), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and National Science Foundation (NSF) have announced new details about their programs funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) (see IBO 2/28/09). This article covers programs from these three agencies that are expected to benefit the […]

The 57th American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) meeting was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 31 though June 4. Despite the recession, attendance only declined slightly to 6,542, down from 6,569 in 2008 (see IBO 6/15/08). The number of exhibitors contracted for the second year in a row, declining to 165 from 171 in […]

Earlier this month, Germany approved €18 billion ($25 billion) in new funding for research and higher education. The Excellence Initiative received €2.7 billion over nine years. First formed in 2006, the Excellence Initiative was created to develop internationally recognized German universities and currently includes eight schools. The second phase of the country’s Higher Education Pact, […]

On June 1, China’s new Food Safety Law took effect, replacing the Food Hygiene Law. The law implements stricter standards and supervision for food safety, as well as aims to improve government efficiency. The Ministry of Health, the lead regulator, has drafted three supplemental regulations for standards, new products and safety risks. To monitor standards […]