15 May 2008 – Wetzlar, Germany / St. Louis, MO, USA Leica Microsystems announced that on May 14, 2008, it acquired the assets of St. Louis, Missouri-based Coretech Holdings and McCormick Scientific, LLC (Coretech), expanding Leica’s leading position in histopathology. Coretech provides an extensive range of systems, instruments, reagents and consumables for the clinical and research histology laboratory. Coretech is comprised of a suite of strong brands including: McCormick Scientific, The Vibratome® Company, Paraplast® embedding media, TurbOflow II® histology cassettes and myNeuroLab.com. Coretech becomes a business unit within the Biosystems Division, and will be renamed Leica Biosystems St. Louis, LLC. Said Doug Martin, formerly CEO of Coretech Holdings, LLC and now Vice President & General Manager of Leica Biosystems St. Louis, LLC, “The synergies created by combining the Coretech products and team with those of Leica Biosystems are considerable. Both companies will quickly leverage an improved product offering for our customers and expand our ability to service the needs of our customers.” “With this acquisition, Leica Biosystems continues to broaden and strengthen the product line we offer our customers. The benefit to customers is that they now have a single partner to come to for all their histology equipment, reagent and consumable needs. Having internal research & development and manufacturing capabilities for our instruments and their associated reagents and consumables allows us to better optimize the entire system, leading to higher quality and more consistent results for our customers,” said Anne De Greef-Safft, President of Leica Microsystems’ Biosystems Division.