Alnylam Licenses RNAi Patents to Qiagen
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals said this week that it has granted Qiagen non-exclusive access to use technology covered under the Kreutzer-Limmer patent family to provide RNAi research products and services.
The intellectual property covers small interfering RNAs and their use to mediate RNAi in mammalian cells.
Qiagen already offers siRNA libraries and high-throughput siRNA synthesis technology.
Galapagos to Acquire BioFocus for $36.5 Million in Stock
Dutch biotech firm Galapagos said this week that it has reached an agreement to acquire UK-based BioFocus for £20.2 million ($36.5 million).
According to the terms of the offer, Galapagos will buy the entire issued share capital of BioFocus by Oct. 12. BioFocus will then become part of the Galapagos group with a 30 percent stake in the firm.
Galapagos CEO Onno van de Stolpe said that the acquisition is expected to enhance the company's position in the drug discovery market.
"We are truly impressed by their drug discovery capabilities [and] we believe that these will greatly accelerate our programs in bone and joint diseases," van de Stolpe said.
PerkinElmer, Invitrogen to Co-Market Cellular Screening Technologies
PerkinElmer and Invitrogen this week said they have inked a co-marketing agreement that will integrate PerkinElmer's CellLux Fluorescence Cellular Screening Platform for cellular screening and Invitrogen's Voltage Sensor Probes ratiometric ion channel reagents.
Peter Coggins, president of PerkinElmer life and analytical sciences, said that the agreement will help both firms' customers "in transitioning to cellular screening, to drive fundamental productivity improvements into the drug discovery and development process."
Nick Ecos, vice president and general manager of Invitrogen's drug discovery solutions business, said the company would seek similar co-marketing agreements in the future. "We will continue to pair our technologies with those from industry-leading companies like PerkinElmer in order to capitalize on our integrated strength," Ecos said.
Financial details were not discussed.
Kreatech Says ISB Collaboration Will Result in New Labeling Kits
Kreatech Biotechnology said this week that its ongoing collaboration with the Institute of Systems Biology will result in two new nucleic acid labeling kits.
ISB has optimized Kreatech's kits, which are based on its Universal Linkage System technology, for bacterial expression profiling and chromatin immunoprecipitation microarray (ChIP-on-chip) assays.
Brent Keller, Kreatech's vice president of commercial applications, told GenomeWeb News today that the company "will be coming out with ULS kits for these applications" based on the ISB collaboration. Keller did not provide a timeline for the commercial release of the new kits, however.
The company previously released kits for array comparative genome hybridization applications and gene-expression analysis.