News in Brief

Vantaa/Finland – Thermo Electron introduces a range of products that are compliant with Directive 98/79/EC on in vitro diagnostic (IVD) medical devices. The IVD Directive provides patients and users a high level of protection and ensures that medical devices attain high performance levels. Thermo’s IVD-CE marked product range includes a comprehensive range of air-displacement pipettes and tips as well as microplate instrumentation.

York/UK – At a conference of the Drug Information Association Xceleron has presented why the earlier introduction of drug candidates into humans is an essential prerequisite for improving attrition rates in clinical development. The new concept is known as human microdosing. It allows human ADME screening studies to make smarter candidate selection prior to committing large resources to full-scale Phase I studies, increasing the success rate of drug candidates and reducing the need for animal testing.
Madison/USA, Amsterdam/The Netherlands – GenTel BioSurfaces and Kreatech Biotechnology has signed an ULS Supply and Marketing License Agreement regarding the sales of ULS reagents for protein labeling and use on single capture antibody chips. GenTel will market and sell the reagents under their brand name Pandeia in diverse kit formats that are validated for use on GenTel's Path protein microarray technology platform.

Hamburg/Germany, Oxford and Glasgow/UK – Evotec has announced that ProPharma, its formulation subsidiary based in Glasgow, is doing business under the Evotec brand with effect from the September 1, 2005. ProPharma will be integrated into the Evotec Services Division over the coming months.

Mannedorf/Switzerland, El Segundo/USA – A new collaboration between Tecan and BioDiscovery is based on the direct integration of data collected by Tecan's HS series of automated hybridization stations with BioDiscovery's GeneDirector microarray data management software. This offers researchers a solution for comprehensive data management that helps them to interpret results unambiguously and better verify their microarray experiments.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne/UK – The Biosystems Informatics Institute (Bii) and its commercial trading arm Turbinia have secured exclusive rights from the German company Pattern Expert to modify and distribute software for the discovery and validation of protein biomarkers. The software has already been successfully used to analyze MS-data in forensic analysis.

Santa Barbara/USA – Wyatt Technology`s Optilab rEX has been selected by R&D Magazine as one of the top 100 innovative new products of the year. This hybrid refractive index (RI) detector also received the 2004 Pittcon Editor's Silver Award. It reaches 256 times the detection power and up to 50 times the dynamic range of any other RI detector in existence.