Palm Springs, CA 1/27/08—Thermo Fisher Scientific has acquired nAscent Biosciences, a supplier of liquid handling consumables for drug discovery screening. NAscent’s PocketTip pipette tip features nanoliter metering and microliter diluting and can be used with a variety of liquid handling systems and handheld pipettors. According to Timo Hilden, vice president and general manager of Thermo […]

Dendritics SAS appointed Imgenex the exclusive distributor of its monoclonal cell research antibodies in North America and India. Cell Signaling Technologies is offering a noncommercial, royalty-free license to its PhosphoScan Profiling technology and information from its PhosphoSite knowledgebase to academic and nonprofit institutions. Exiqon A/S granted Applied Biosystems a license to its Locked Nucleic Acids […]

Santa Clara, CA 1/31/08—Agilent Technologies announced that it has filed suit against Advanced Materials Technology (AMT) in the Delaware Court of Chancery. The complaint contends that three former Agilent employees, now with AMT, breached their confidentiality agreement with Agilent, misappropriated trade secrets and breached fiduciary duties in developing AMT’s Halo HPLC columns.

Promega released the HaloCHIP System, an antibody-free alternative to chromatin immunoprecipitation. Varian introduced TOP-DNA and TOP-RNA for the purification of synthetic oligonucleotides. Sigma-Aldrich launched the mirPremier miRNA Isolation Kit for purification of miRNA within 30 minutes. Biosynth AG launched the fluorescence-based BCM MRSA ELF culture medium for detection of methicillin-resistant MRA in hospital and medical […]

Stormy weather and difficult travel conditions delayed some weekend travelers to the tenth annual LabAutomation conference, which took place January 26–30 at the Palm Springs Convention Center in Palm Springs, California. However, clearer skies prevailed on Monday, the first day of the conference’s scientific program and first full day of the exhibition. The Association for […]

Malvern, UK 1/17/08—Malvern Instruments, a Spectris company, has acquired Viscotek, a provider of chromatography and viscometry products for the characterization of natural and synthetic polymers and proteins. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in Houston, Texas, Viscotek offers systems for gel permeation chromatography, flow injection polymer analysis and dilute solution viscosity. “Viscotek has a long-established reputation […]

Four Companies Make Bid for Whatman London, UK 1/14/08 and 1/15/08—Filtration and life science consumables company Whatman has confirmed that it has received offers to acquire the company. The Financial Times reported on January 15 that Danaher, General Electric, Millipore and Parker Hannifin have approached the company and that the auction’s second round was held […]

The life science instrumentation market grew 8.7% to $9.2 billion in 2007. The market consists of DNA and peptide sequencers, DNA and peptide synthesizers, nucleic acid amplification or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) systems, gel electrophoresis equipment, molecular biology purification kits, microarray-based products, biosensors, bioinformatics and cheminformatics, cell analysis technologies and in vivo animal imaging. The […]

The molecular spectroscopy market is as consistent as any segment of the entire analytical instrument market. Overall, the molecular spectroscopy market is expected to grow 6.3% in 2008, a scant 0.1% increase over the forecast for 2007. Furthermore, with the exception of Raman spectroscopy, which is the smallest of all molecular spectroscopy segments, no other […]

Most everyone would agree that 2007 was a very good year, except for the last few months when subprime loans and housing issues dominated the news. The analytical and life science instrument industry turned in an unexpectedly strong performance. Instrument companies continued to focus on emerging markets. Biotech spending was robust and pharmaceutical expenditures improved […]