The tussle for the control of Biosite has continued with Beckman Coulter increasing its offer to $90 (€66) a share (from $85), or approximately $1.67bn to match the competing offer from Inverness Medical.
The news comes on the back of Beckman Coulter announcing a 14 per cent rise in profits for the first quarter of 2007. The company's net income rose to £37.1m from $32.6m a year earlier with total revenues for the quarter up 7.8 per cent to $613.6m.
Thermo Fisher Scientific is to close its East Greenbush facility in the US that it acquired with its purchase of air monitoring device manufacturer Rupprecht & Patashnick (R&P) two years ago.
The closure will lead to at least 60 staff redundancies with 20 staff being offered jobs at Thermo Fisher Scinetific's plant in Franklin, Massachusetts.
"The business was responding to regulations the EPA mandated and some of that has levelled off. The growth wasn't there. So we had to make a business decision," said Karen Kirkwood, a spokeswoman for Thermo Fisher Scientific.
R&P's co-founder Harvey Patashnick is upset by the company's decision as he believes that Thermo Fisher Scientific's CEO Mrijn Deckers gave him "absolute assurance they were going to maintain the facility".
Millipore has announced that Charles Wagner will succeed Kathleen Allen as the company's chief financial officer as of August 15, 2007. The news comes after one-off costs related to its acquisition of Serologicals and a continuing consolidation strategy saw sharp falls in Millipore's pre-tax and net profits for the first quarter of 2007.
GE Healthcare has completed a license agreement with Norwegian biotechnology firm NorDiag, granting NorDiag access to GE's patents for the biomagnetic isolation of nucleic acids. The technique can offer advantages over conventional techniques for the isolation and purification of DNA and RNA from laboratory and clinical sample especially as they allow the use of smaller patient samples.
"This license recognizes the considerable value that our biomagnetic isolation technology can bring to the diagnosis of infectious diseases," said Eric Roman, GE Healthcare's general manager of Genomic Sciences.
"We are pleased to grant NorDiag ASA access to our patents in this area, which will allow them to commercialise products that can isolate nucleic acids from difficult clinical samples."
454 Life Sciences (soon to be a subsidiary of Roche holdings ) has announced a collaboration with the Malyasian Genomics Resource Centre (MGRC) to apply high-speed DNA sequencing and bioinformatics technologies to the characterisation of tropical organisms and diseases.
"Malaysia is investing significant resources in establishing itself as a regional hub for biotechnology research and industrialization," said Christopher McLeod, CEO of 454 Life Sciences.
