Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. has entered into an agreement to acquire AnorMED Inc., a Canada-based biopharmaceutical company with a late-stage Phase III hematology-oncology product, Mozobil. Under the terms of the agreement approved by the boards of directors of both companies and the largest shareholder of AnorMED, Millennium will commence within ten days a cash tender offer to acquire the shares of AnorMED stock at a price of U.S. $12.00 per outstanding share, for a total purchase price of approximately $515 million. This represents approximately a 21 percent premium over the closing price of AnorMED's shares on September 25, 2006. Read the press release.
Illumina Inc. has introduced two new products in its Infinium Whole-Genome Genotyping product line, the HumanHap300-Duo and the HumanHap300-Duo+ Genotyping BeadChips. According to the company, these products are the world's first multi-sample whole-genome genotyping arrays, enabling researchers to analyze two samples simultaneously, with over 634,000 total tag SNPs on a single BeadChip, 317,000 tag SNPs per sample. The content for both products is based on the HumanHap300 Genotyping BeadChip, launched earlier this year. Read the press release.
Waters Corp. announced it will expand its research collaboration with Imperial College London by equipping the Waters Laboratory of Molecular Spectroscopy at Imperial College London with three high-end research instruments – the Waters ACQUITY UPLC System, and Waters Q-Tof Premier and GCT Premier Mass Spectrometers. The announcement was made as Imperial unveiled a new state-of-the-art NMR facility that will allow the Division of Molecular Biosciences to drive broad research programs in the increasingly important area of systems biology. Read the press release.
Ariadne Genomics Inc. has licensed Pathway Studio and its Enterprise installation, PathwayExpert software to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to be used for pathway and microarray data analysis with integrated literature mining. The NCI has purchased site licenses of Ariadne pathway analysis software, together with the ResNet database making it available to every researcher at the NCI. "We are honored that the National Cancer Institute has chosen Ariadne pathway software to facilitate its cancer target and biomarker research", said Ilya Mazo, President of Ariadne. An important aspect of the decision is that Pathway Studio automatically updates the database, keeping the NCI users up-to-date while the flexible user interface allows for expansion of known pathways and new regulatory networks reconstruction focused on specific research tasks. Read the press release.
Gene-IT, a provider of biological sequence search for research and IP, today announced that it is providing its flagship GenomeQuest service to biotech company Biogen Idec. GenomeQuest is a biological sequence search solution that enables biologists to evaluate novel gene sequences, and allows IP lawyers to evaluate freedom-to-operate, patentability, and competitive landscape features for the same sequences. The solution uniquely combines easy-to-use sequence search and analytics with public and proprietary sequence content, including the industry’s largest and most complete indexed archive of more than 30 million patented sequences. Read the press release.