NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – In the latter half of 2013, Bio-Rad Laboratories accrued $35 million in costs associated with its initial efforts to resolve investigations into violations of federal anti-bribery laws, the company said in its Form 10-K this week. The company had previously said that in 2010 it disclosed to the US Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission that conduct by certain of its overseas operations may have violated the anti-bribery provisions of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The conduct likely may have violated the FCPA's books and records and internal controls provisions, as well as Bio-Rad's internal policies. Bio-Rad said that $30 million of the costs were booked to SG&A expenses, and $5 million was booked to interest expense. The company said it continues to cooperate with the DOJ and SEC investigations and to provide information to them.
Pacific Biosciences said in its Form 10-K that it has settled a lawsuit related to its initial public offering in 2010. The lawsuit was filed by Thomas Primo in late 2011 and alleged that the company hid problems related to its third-generation sequencing technology, which rendered statements made by PacBio about its finances and future outlook "materially false and misleading." Specifically, Primo said that claims made by PacBio in its prospectus for its IPO turned out to be untrue. In November, the company settled similar litigation associated with its IPO, in which the plaintiffs alleged that PacBio violated federal securities law and accused the company of, among other things, making inaccurate and misleading statements on its registration statement while omitting other facts.
Qiagen has been dropped from the Nasdaq Q-50 Index, a market capitalization-weighted index that tracks securities that are "next-eligible" for inclusion into the Nasdaq-100 Index. Nasdaq Q-50 is reranked each quarter, and Qiagen was one of 12 firms that were removed to make place for 12 new ones.
SQI Diagnostics has expanded a product development relationship with an unnamed drug maker to develop a custom multiplex test to support clinical drug development efforts. The firms have entered into a revenue-generating agreement with the pharma firm to develop a 21-plex protein microarray. The test will be used to identify specific immunogenic regions within a specific drug during the drug firm's human clinical trials. The new agreement includes payments for services and for the consumables used during development and sample testing, SQI said.
Equity investor Summit Partners has made a minority investment into Integrated DNA Technologies, a supplier of custom nucleic acids. In connection with the investment Craig Frances, managing director of Summit Partners, has joined IDT's board. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
In Brief This Week is a Friday column containing news items that our readers may have missed during the week.