Research Areas

Nanostream Inc. earlier this month rolled out a fraction collector add-on to it Veloce micro parallel liquid chromatography system. The fraction collector was developed in response to customers who were looking to take advantage of the Veloce system as a sample preparation device for mass spec applications.

For many in the pharmaceutical and medical industries, personalized medicine has become the latest holy grail, and CombiMatrix Corp. believes it has the right DNA microarray capabilities to be a leader in making personalized medicine a reality. As such, the company recently formed a wholly owned subsidiary called CombiMatrix Molecular Diagnostics (CMD), which will be led by two former executives of Irvine, Calif.-based US Labs.

Invitrogen Corp. announced in mid-May it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held immunological assay manufacturer Caltag Laboratories in a cash transaction totaling $20 million.

Further cementing a business relationship forged in the late 1990s, PerkinElmer and Nonlinear Dynamics announced in late April that PE will distribute Nonlinear’s complete range of 1D, 2D and array software and that it named Nonlinear as the exclusive provider of informatics software for its proteomics line.

Health Discovery Corp. may not hold all the cards when it comes to marketing and development of support vector machine (SVM) technology—the likely successor to neural networks. But it certainly has come very close with the recent completion of its acquisition of an extensive SVM patent portfolio previously owned by BioWulf Technologies and BioWulf Genomics.

Biotechnology company BioE announced in May that it would make commercially available stem cell lines cloned from human umbilical cord blood rather than obtained from human embryos. The company is reportedly the first firm to come to market with such lines, which it refers to as Multi-Lineage Progenitor Cells (MLPCs).

The results of a four-year sponsored research program with the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Nanostructured Polymers Research Center came to fruition in early May when Bentley Pharmaceuticals announced its new Nanocaplet technology.

The late March announcement that Cambridge, U.K.-based Cytomix would acquire Ardais Corp.’s biorepository of more than 130,000 biospecimens was much more than a simple transaction for Ardais. It marked the completion of a year-long strategic remaking of Ardais that moved the company from a provider of biospecimens for the research community, to a consultant whose services help research centers manager their internal tissue collection and biospecimen management systems.

Vaccine specialist VaxGen recently announced a collaborative effort with privately held biotechnology company EndoBiologics International to pursue research into a vaccine that targets meningitis B, a bacterial disease that targets children and can lead to mental retardation, loss of limbs, and even death. According to Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meningitis attacks approximately 1 in every 100,000 people worldwide, but regional epidemics can kill tens of thousands of people.

Newly designated FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford will deliver a keynote address at the 10th Annual Drug Discovery Technology & Development World Congress, scheduled for August 8-11 at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center here. Dr. Crawford’s speech, “New Regulatory Directions for the 21st Century,” will explore the theme of the conference “Optimizing the Discovery and Development Interface to Improve Productivity.” His remarks will focus on new regulatory and scientific steps to make the introduction of novel drugs more predictable and less time-consuming. He will also elaborate on the FDA’s reforms designed to facilitate the modernization of drug manufacturing and to strengthen the safety of marketed medicines.