PerkinElmer Acquires Indian Subsidiary
PerkinElmer said this week it has acquired the remaining minority interest in PerkinElmer India from Labindia Instruments, making it a wholly owned subsidiary of the company. PerkinElmer India, launched in 2004, is a direct sales, service, and marketing company targeting India’s life science and analytical instrumentation markets.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Jai Shankar was appointed president of PerkinElmer India. PerkinElmer India currently has about 170 employees. The company said it plans to open a new India headquarters in Mumbai and a new support and applications center later this year.
Bayer Healthcare Extends Licensing Agreement with Ariadne Software
Bayer Healthcare said this week it will renew and expand its license for Ariadne Pathway Studio software until the end of 2010.
Pathway Studio uses Ariadne’s proprietary MedScan natural language processing technology. Bayer will use it for pathway research, toxicology studies, and microarray data analysis.
Ariadne said in a statement that Bayer has already used Pathway Studio for several years and will now have more research sites using it. It will also have early access to a MedScan extension for extracting toxicology data from text.
Proteros Achieves Receives Milestone Payment in Collaboration with Bayer
Proteros said this week it achieved the first milestone of its collaboration with Bayer HealthCare in fragment-based protein crystallography, triggering a milestone payment. The amount of the payment was not disclosed.
The collaboration was reached in June 2006. Proteros uses its Free Mounting System and Picodropper Technologies to deliver protein-ligand-structures of active fragments from Bayer’s drug discovery programs to Bayer.
Terms of the deal give Proteros a copy of the jointly selected fragment library for its own use.
Monash U, Farfield Collaborate on Biosensor Surfaces
Farfield Scientific in the UK and the biochemistry and molecular biology department of Monash University in Australia said this week they are partnering to create biosensor surfaces for a new approach to the structural analysis of membrane protein function.
Marie-Isabel Aguilar, associate professor at Monash, who is leading the project at the university, said in a statement that the new sensor chips will have specially characterized phospholipids surfaces developed using patented Monash technology.
The structure of the different membrane surfaces will be analyzed using high-resolution measurements from Farfield Analight Bio200 Dual Polarization Interferometry, she said. The parties plan to commercialize the biosensor surfaces developed from the collaboration.
Minerva Licenses Osmetech’s SAM Technology
Osmetech this week said it has licensed the use of its self-assembling monolayer technology to Minerva Biotechnology for functional proteomics, signal enhancement, drug design, and drug screening.
Minerva will use Osmetech’s technology in conjunction with its own proprietary nanoparticle technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Osmetech licensed the SAM technology from Harvard University in 1997. Cynthia Bamdad, Minerva’s founder and CSO, was the lead inventor.
Monarch Using GeneGo’s 1-2-3 Workflow
Monarch LifeSciences will offer pathway analysis add-on services using GeneGo’s 1-2-3 Workflow, GeneGo said this week.
The workflow “automatically uploads proteomics data, compares the datasets, identifies common, similar, and unique components of the datasets, conducts enrichment analysis in multiple ontologies …calculates the most relevant networks and the focal hub proteins,” the company said in a statement.
Monarch, a contract research organization specializing in protein biomarker discovery, development, and validation was formerly called the Indiana Centers for Applied Protein Sciences, or INCAPS.
Proteomics Emphasized as Kansas Overhauls its Biomedical Sector
Kansas unveiled this week a sweeping plan to use proteomics, bioinformatics, genomics, and compound synthesis to support clinical research and treatment centers.
The $800 million, 10-year program is an overhaul of the state’s biomedical sector to make the region more competitive in life sciences.
As part of its new emphasis on proteomics, Kansas University Medical Center will receive funding for new equipment and staff for its mass spectrometry and proteomics lab, a spokeswoman told ProteoMonitor sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News.
The plan also calls for expanding bioinformatics by hiring new senior and programming-level researchers, by growing into new facilities, and through investing in new hardware and software platforms.
KUMC also will seek to fuel its high-throughput screening programs and to establish a drug-discovery program by hiring a director for HTS, bringing in other senior and junior faculty, and by laying down funds for new equipment. The HTS lab would be supported in part by contractual screening services.