Tools & Techniques

SpinX Technologies, a provider of biological assay technology, recently secured Euro 10 million ($12.5 million) in Series B financing led by Bio Fund Management. Also involved in the financing—which will support the further development and initial commercialization of SpinX’s programmable microfluidics platform to perform biological assays—were Index Ventures, Auriga Partners, DFJ ePlanet Ventures and the CERN Pension Fund.

In early September, Caliper Life Sciences announced it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Hanover, Md.-based NovaScreen Biosciences Corp., a privately-held company that provides screening, profiling and assay development services for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worldwide and for government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health.

MultiCell Technologies Inc., will leverage its human hepatocyte line and associated products by developing therapeutics on its own through a new majority-owned subsidiary, Monticello Immunotherapeutics Inc. In conjunction with the formation of Monticello, MultiCell recently acquired the intellectual property and equipment of Astral Inc., a San Diego-based biotechnology company that focuses on the development of novel therapies for the treatment of type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, cancer and infectious disease.

Scientists at the University of Warwick, led by Dr. Gregory Challis, may be unlocking the door to new drugs and therapeutic targets by mining the genome of microorganisms for hidden metabolic keys. They published their work in the October issue of Nature Chemical Biology. Applied widely, genome mining should provide access to new natural products with molecular diversity unmatched by synthetic chemical techniques.

Simplifying the use of microarrays and increasing the reproducibility of experiment results are two of the rationales behind a new co-marketing agreement that bundles Eppendorf’s DualChip microarray slides and PerkinElmer’s ScanArray GX microarray analysis system.

The Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration & Repair (HCNR) and GE Healthcare in August began a collaboration that will see HCNR use GE’s IN Cell Analyzer imaging system to advance its studies of the human central nervous system and neurodegenerative diseases. In addition, GE scientists will work with HCNR’s Center for Bioinformatics to develop new software tools addressing degenerative diseases of the brain.

Kinexus Bioinformatics Corp. will introduce its subscription-based KiNET database this fall, giving researchers a new online resource for functional proteomics data.

The National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) has released its Integrated SYStem (ISYS) software platform—which integrates independent bioinformatic software tools and databases—in an open source version.

Biomolecular technology and pharmaceutical company Odyssey Thera announced recently it had signed an agreement to provide the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) with a cell-based compound screening system that will be used to further the NIH Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative. The technology, protein-fragment complementation assay (PCA), will allow NCGC to screen human cell lines for the impact of potential drugs on biochemical pathways. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

In announcing plans by its Columbia, Md.-based subsidiary K-D Medical to acquire a new facility with two validated, class 100 clean rooms, CalbaTech not only had expanded manufacture of products on its mind, but also the opportunity to profit by leasing part of the new space to other companies—some of whom could be engaged in drug discovery efforts.

Continuing a strategy of making its core technology available to a variety of outside research and development organizations, CombiMatrix announced last month that the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University has begun work toward the development of a peptide array synthesizer.