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In Brief This Week: Interleukin Genetics, Quest Diagnostics, FDA, and More

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Interleukin Genetics this week filed documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to complete the process of delisting and deregistering its securities. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based firm announced in late July that it would be liquidating its assets. That announcement followed plans by the firm to lay off 63 percent of its workforce and suspend sales of its genetic test for severe gum disease and elevated systemic inflammation.


Quest Diagnostics this week declared a quarterly dividend of $.45 per common share, payable on Oct. 18, to shareholders of record on Oct. 3.


The US Food and Drug Administration this week preliminarily found that test tubes from Becton Dickinson were not the cause of inaccurate blood-lead test results using Magellan Diagnostics' tests and systems. In the spring, the agency warned that blood-lead results conducted with equipment from Magellan were inaccurate. Prior to the warning, Magellan told its customers that the cause of the inaccurate results may have been blood collection tubes from BD. The FDA, however, said that an inspection of BD’s Franklin Lakes, New Jersey facility has "not determined that the BD tubes or any other brand of tube is linked to the cause of the inaccurate lead test results. We are continuing to aggressively investigate the matter." However, the agency said it did make several observations during its inspection of the BD facility that may be violations of federal law and is reviewing the evidence to decide whether further action will be necessary.


Bruker said this week that its board has approved a quarterly cash dividend of $.04 per share, payable on Sept. 22 to stockholders of record as of Sept. 5.  


Novacyt reported this week that it had a net loss of €1.7 million ($2.0 million), or €.09 per share, for the first half of 2017. The firm previously reported a 40 percent year-over-year increase in its H1 revenues. Novacyt said that it had €2.6 million in cash and cash equivalents as of the end of June.


PositiveID this week reported second quarter revenues fell to $1.2 million from $1.8 million in Q2 2016. The company said the decrease in revenues was driven primarily by the timing of delivery of projects in its mobile labs segment. PositiveID expects full-year 2017 revenues to exceed 2016 revenues of $5.6 million.


Cancer Treatment Centers of America and Foundation Medicine announced this week that they have added an educational initiative to their longstanding partnership to increase awareness of advancements in genomic testing and precision medicine in oncology. The initiative is directed toward physicians, other caregivers, and patients, to highlight the importance of integrating comprehensive genomic testing of solid tumors early in an individual's care plan as a model to inform personalized care and improve clinical outcomes for individuals with cancer, the partners said.


SoftGenetics announced this week that it has purchased the assets of Mitotyping Technologies. The assets include software tools for STR Analysis, mitochondrial and STR analysis of next-generation data, and the soon-to-be-released MaSTRTM continuous mixture probabilistic software, the firm said. Nina Fosnacht, current CFO of SoftGenetics, will be taking on additional responsibilities as the chief operating officer of the Mitotyping Technologies business.


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.