People in the News
Agilent Technologies named Nick Roelofs as vice president and general manager of its life sciences solutions division, the company said last week.
Previously, Roelofs was group operations officer for the life science group at Bio-Rad Laboratories. He also served as chief operating officer of Stratagene. He has held senior positions at Applied Biosystems and Baxter Diagnostic.
Norwegian life sciences company DiaGenic said last week that it has appointed to its scientific advisory board three Alzheimer's disease experts: Bengt Winblad, Khalid Iqbal, and Dag Aarsland.
Winblad is head of the Karolinska Institute's Alzheimer's Disease Research Centre in Stockholm, a member of the Nobel Assembly for the Prize of Medicine and Physiology, and chairman of the Medical Scientific Advisory Panel of Alzheimer's Disease International.
Iqbal is professor and chairman of the department of neurochemistry at the New York State Institute for Basic Research. With Winblad, he co-founded the biennial International Conferences on Alzheimer's Disease & Related Disorders.
Aarsland is professor of geriatric psychiatry at the University of Bergen and the head of the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Stavanger, both in Norway.
Solexa named Richard Lussier to the newly created position of vice president of sales and field operations, the company said last week.
He was president and general manager of Applied Biosystems Japan for five years and held other managerial positions in US, Japanese, and other Asian field organizations for ABI. He also managed the Asia-Pacific operations for Celera Genomics and held global field operations management positions with MJ Research, now part of Bio-Rad, and with Fluidigm.
Lussier received his MBA from Temple University and conducted postgraduate studies in molecular biology at the University of Vermont. He received a BS in biology and chemistry from Rhode Island College.
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New Product Watch
Beckman Coulter this week launched its Agencourt FormaPure system, for the extraction of DNA and RNA from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue samples.
The company said the system can be automated on the Beckman Coulter Biomek NX Span-8 Laboratory Automation Workstation to process 96 samples in four hours.
Agencourt FormaPure also incorporates Beckman's Agencourt Solid Phase Reversible Immobilization paramagnetic bead-based nucleic acid purification technology, and does not require organic solvents, vacuum filtration or centrifugation steps, the firm said.
Affymetrix this week launched its Affymetrix UserForum, an online magazine featuring weekly updates on new company technology, analyses, services, and training.
According to Affy, the UserForum will offer articles, interviews, and live web talks with interactive question-and-answer sessions. Topics covered include software tools, third-party providers, and collaboration updates, the company said.