Tools & Techniques

Beckman’s acquisition of Coulter Corporation in October 1997 created the company as it is today, one of the largest providers of diagnostics and life science research products in the industry. Scott Garrett was named CEO of the company in February and recently took time for an exclusive interview with DDN Chief Editor Chris Anderson to share his vision of the industry and Beckman Coulter’s path for the future.

Just five years after it began a project to develop the next generation of supercomputers, IBM announced in early June a joint research effort with Switzerland’s The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), to begin building a detailed model of the largest and most complex part of the human brain, the neocortex. The project, dubbed “Blue Brain”, will employ the staggering computing capacity of IBM’s eServer Blue Gene supercomputer.

A special meeting of Argonaut shareholders in early June formally approved the sale of the company’s assets and consumables and process instrument business to Biotage, a move that strengthens the company’s offerings in medicinal chemistry, thermal synthesis, cleanup and purification systems. Total purchase price amounted to 145 million Swedish krona or about $21.2 million. In all, sales from Argonaut products are expected to add over $18 million in annual sales to Biotage’s bottom line, an increase of roughly 25 percent.

The Blueprint Initiative Asia recently introduced directed data curation services that are designed to deliver to clients defined biomolecular interaction data to facilitate scientific research efforts. These curation services are expected to help scientists identify important biological molecules and complexes, such as drug targets, diagnostic biomarkers, and metabolic processes critical to healthcare.

Drug discovery informatics provider Tripos Inc. announced plans last month to embrace web services as a key strategic component of its informatics products and future product development strategy.

Waters Corp. and Munich, Germany-based InfoChem GmbH announced last month that Waters would include InfoChem’s reaction search technology based on Chemistry Cartridge in future generations of its eLab Notebook software.

Data pipeline and workflow tools company SciTegic and Tripos Inc. announced in late June that Tripos joined SciTegic’s independent software vendor (ISV) partner program to provide software compatibility between their product lines.

Late last month, Upstate Group, a division of Serologicals Corp., and CXR Biosciences announced the two companies would work together to create an early-stage toxicology screening platform the companies believe will allow for more effective screening of drug candidate compounds.

In a deal expected to close earlier this month, Agilent Technologies recently announced it signed a merger agreement with scientific information management company Scientific Software Inc. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

BioPhysics Assay Laboratory (BioPAL) announced in mid-June that the National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health had awarded the company a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant.

After the acquisition of TekCel, Magellan Biosciences indirectly continues to expand its automation instrument empire as TekCel announces its acquisition of ultra-low-temperature sample-management specialist Biophile, Inc., based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Biophile's systems are used for temperature-sensitive work involving DNA, tissue, and tumor storage, and complement the automation systems already in play at TekCel and Magellan Bioscience.

At the 65th Annual American Diabetes Association Meeting, Entelos presented data from their collaboration with the ADA in two poster sessions. One poster described a comprehensive analysis on the time-dependent effects of treatment in a mouse model for human type 1 diabetes. The other presentation described the company's Type 1 Diabetes PhysioLab modeling platform, which offers large-scale mathematical simulations of disease pathology and therapeutic intervention in the model mice.