NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — Applied Microarrays, which has been selling GE Healthcare’s CodeLink microarrays since Tuesday, was created last year by a former GE Healthcare employee who helped design the technology while at Motorola Life Sciences, GenomeWeb Daily News has learned.
According to the researcher, Alastair Malcolm, the CodeLink facilities will be based in a lab that Applied Microarrays leases from Arizona State University in Tempe. The company is not affiliated with ASU.
Malcolm, who came to GE Healthcare via Motorola and Amersham, and who left GE to found Applied Microarrays, said that when he heard GE was selling CodeLink, he began drawing up plans to reunite with the brand and some of his former colleagues.
“The facility is intact, the team is intact,” Malcolm said.
Malcolm told GenomeWeb Daily News that Applied Microarrays’ “strategic intent isn’t to focus on just current CodeLink products.” Rather, he said the company plans to use the platform and the technology available at the Tempe lab to develop “all kinds of arrays” and to partner with content providers to build custom arrays.
GE Healthcare told its customers last December that it would no longer sell the arrays. As GenomeWeb Daily News reported this morning, Applied Microarrays has been making and selling pre-arrayed CodeLink products, including human, mouse, and rat whole-genome arrays, since May 1.
GE Healthcare will continue to sell CodeLink’s non-arrayed activated slides and related reagents, GE said. Neither company would disclose the financial terms of the deal, which closed last Friday.
Today, GE Healthcare spokesperson Arvind Gopalratnam said that if Applied Microarrays had not purchased CodeLink, GE Healthcare would have shut down the array business and sold its assets.