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In Brief This Week: Thermo Fisher, Agilent, Danaher, and More

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Thermo Fisher Scientific disclosed in a regulatory filing this week that the aggregate purchase price for IntegenX was $65 million. The company announced that it had acquired IntegenX, a developer of rapid DNA testing technology for forensics and human identification, in March.


Agilent Technologies said this week that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Lasergen. Agilent made its initial investment in the privately held company in March 2016, acquiring a 48 percent ownership stake with a two-year call option to acquire the remaining shares for $105 million. Agilent gave its notice to exercise the option on February 23. Since the initial investment, Lasergen and Agilent have been collaborating to develop a workflow solution for clinical applications based on next-generation sequencing, using Lasergen's Lightning Terminators chemistry.


Danaher said this week that its board has approved a quarterly dividend of $.16 per share, payable on July 27 to shareholders of record on June 29.


Instrumentation Laboratory said this week that its total 2017 worldwide sales grew 22 percent year over year to $970 million. Organic growth was almost 7 percent, while corporate acquisitions grew sales by almost 16 percent. Among Instrumentation Laboratory's buys in 2017 was its purchase of Accriva Diagnostics.


Invivoscribe Technologies said this week that it is collaborating with the American University of Beirut Medical Center in Lebanon to create a reference laboratory that offers specialized gene panels. According to Invivoscribe, the facility will serve as an international service laboratory in the Middle East and provide testing for all hematologic diseases, including leukemia and lymphoma. The partnership will enable the AUB Medical Center to provide its pharmaceutical and clinical partners in the Middle East with the standardized tests and bioinformatics tools provided by Invivoscribe's Laboratory for Personalized Molecular Medicine clinical facilities in the US, Japan, and Germany. Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.


Cytox and AkesoGen said this week they have verified the performance of the Cytox GenoBar test with saliva samples, extending an existing research collaboration. The GenoBar test, for research use only, is intended to help pharma, biotech, and sponsors of large cohort studies identify and stratify subjects for clinical trials and population research. The companies found 99 percent concordance between the SNPs used in the polygenic risk score identified from blood and saliva samples collected from the same subjects and run using the Cytox VariaTect microarray. The results of this verification study will provide an additional means to collect DNA from prospective clinical trial and cohort subjects and opens the possibility of screening even larger population groups for disease risk, the companies noted.


TTP and Camena Bioscience announced this week that they are collaborating to develop an instrument to monitor the health of cell cultures. The new instrument will be used in the manufacturing of biologic medicines and will be developed by TTP as part of a new project led by Camena and cofunded by Innovate UK. TTP will integrate Camena's small-molecule detection technology into a new instrument that will allow researchers to monitor metabolite levels in cell cultures more easily.


In Brief This Week is a selection of news items that may be of interest to our readers but had not previously appeared on the GenomeWeb site.