Research Areas

Insightful Corp. announced in mid-May that it received two awards for bioinformatics work under the U.S. government’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. A Phase II contract with the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and a Phase I grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are worth a total of approximately $850,000. Both projects involve Insightful’s InFact software, which performs natural language-based analysis and search functions on large quantities of text.

Roche Diagnostics announced in early May that it had entered into an exclusive, five-year, world-wide agreement for the development, promotion, sale and distribution of 454 Life Science’s nanotechnology-based Genome Sequencing Systems, including proprietary kits and reagents. Under the terms of the agreement, 454, a division of CuraGen Corp., will receive up to $62 million in license fees, milestone payments related to instrument releases, minimum royalties and research funding.

AA Peptides, LLC, doing business as AAPPTec (Advanced Automated Peptide Protein Technologies), announced in May it purchased the instrument division of Advanced ChemTech (ACT). Hossain Saneii, AAPPTec’s chief operating officer, said AAPPTec will manufacture and sell parts and instruments, and provide continued customer service and technical support for ACT peptide manufacturing equipment. The ACT technology is “well-known in the peptide field,” says Saneii, “very established” and capable of all scales of peptide production. AAPPTec also obtained patent rights to the instruments.

BD Diagnostics announced in early May that it had acquired German proteomics and instrumentation provider FFE Weber GmbH. The purchase gives BD a foothold in the growing proteomics research market as well as a technology the company feels could become an important diagnostic tool in the coming years.

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).