Industry news in brief

LabTechnologist.com presents its periodic round up of recent industry news with new developments at Agilent, Ciphergen, Illumina, Inverness, PerkinElmer and Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Inverness has tried to hijack Beckman Coulter's takeover of Biosite by making an unsolicited higher offer of $1.6bn (€1.2bn). Biosite has agreed to consider the higher bid. Interestingly, the $1.5bn offered by Beckman Coulter had been considered by some analysts as too high with the offer that represented a 56 per cent premium to Biosite's stock price at the time.

"The Biosite board has not withdrawn, qualified, modified, changed or amended its recommendation with respect to the Beckman Coulter tender offer," said Biosite.

Agilent have agreed to acquire Stratagene, a provider of a range diagnostic products that include applications for allergy testing, autoimmune disorders and urinalysis, for $246m.

The acquisition of Stratagene is expected to broaden the customer base of both companies and increase Agilent's market share of the total life sciences market, estimated at $14bn to over 6 per cent.

Following the merger, Stratagene staff are expected to join Agilent's Life Science Solutions unit with Joseph Sorge, Stratagene CEO and founder, forming a new company that will buy certain assets back from Agilent following the close of the sale for $6.6m.

Ciphergen's auditors, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, have expressed a "going concern" qualification, which is designed to warn the investing public of the financial distress and impending failure of the company.

Illumina have announced that it will close its biomedical plant in Wallingford by the end of this year and consolidate its operations into its Southern California facilities. The factory had been used to manufacture the BeadXpress line of genetic analysis tools and the closure is expected to affect about 30 jobs.

"With the completion of our acquisition of Solexa, we took the opportunity to evaluate all of our operations. We determined that consolidating the Wallingford operations into San Diego will provide us with efficiencies from both the manufacturing and product development perspective," said Jay Flatley, CEO of Illumina.

PerkinElmer has entered into a multi-million dollar agreement with Capital Health to provide tandem mass spectrometry systems, reagent kits and screening software to expand Capital Health's newborn screening program for inherited metabolic disorders, including cystic fibrosis, in Alberta, financial terms were not disclosed.

Thermo Fisher Scientific have announced that Paul Meister, chairman of the

board, and former vice chairman of Fisher Scientific International has decided to retire from his position.

"I am delighted with the progress made to integrate the Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific businesses. Marijn Dekkers and his team have been doing a superb job and he has my complete confidence. It has been a great personal privilege to be associated with this outstanding company," he commented.