Pairings
Greg Lucier, Chairman and CEO of Invitrogen was elected to the board of directors of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the group said this week.
According to the Sunday Times of London, retiring GE Healthcare CEO Bill Castell may take the reins of the Wellcome Trust when its current chairman, Sir Dominic Cadbury, retires. A Wellcome Trust spokesperson told BioArray News' sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News that this report is "speculation," and that the UK-based medical research charity is still trying to "identify suitable people" to replace Cadbury.
New Releases
Applied Biosystems this week launched its TaqMan Drug Metabolism Genotyping Assays, a collection of more than 2,000 assays for detecting polymorphisms in more than 220 drug-metabolizing enzyme genes, the company said this week. A preliminary version of the assays is available through an early-access customer program, ABI said.
The assays are single-tube probe-and-primer sets for use on the company's real-time PCR instruments, and can detect multiple types of polymorphisms, SNPs, insertions and deletions, and multiple nucleotide Polymorphisms, ABI said. The assays are limited to regulatory coding regions and splice junctions, the company added. See http://DME.appliedbiosystems.com/ for more information
This item has been updated to correct the name of the manufacturer of the BioRobot System. The product is made by Qiagen, not PerkinElmer.
Qiagen launched its BioRobot Universal System "automated solution" for systems biology this week, the company said. The instrument provides a range of "ready-to-run" applications in 96-well format, including DNA and RNA purification, and PCR and RT-PCR, Qiagen said. Protein and sequencing applications will be available soon, the company said.