Diagnostics & Imaging Week Contributing Writer
And D&IWs

Genetix Group (New Milton, UK), a manufacturer of equipment for genomics and proteomics research, is acquiring Applied Imaging (San Jose, California/New Castle, UK) in an all-cash transaction valued at £9.6 million (US $18.3 million).

Genetix will pay $3.06 per share, with the transaction expected to close in the fourth quarter. The money comes from the company's existing resources, it said.

Applied Imaging specializes in prenatal genetic testing and cancer diagnosis, using systems it has developed for detecting cells that occur at extremely low levels and then identifying them with proprietary cell analysis software. The company is part of a European Union collaborative project, Dismal, that is developing a way of detecting metastasizing cancer cells.

Mark Reid, founder and CEO of Genetix, said the acquisition will strengthen the company's position in both drug discovery and clinical diagnostics. "The expanded product portfolio, as well as Applied Imaging's strength in the key U.S. market, will help with cross-selling opportunities, and an improved level of support for our customer base."

Genetix was one of the leading suppliers of equipment to the Human Genome Project and has since branched out into the analysis of disease processes and applying its technology to selecting protein targets for drug discovery.

Robin Stracey, president/CEO of Applied Imaging, said Genetix's capabilities were very complementary, with synergies and the prospects for enhanced competitiveness of the combined company. "We believe this is the right path for our stockholders, our customers and our employees."

Applied Imaging had revenues of $20 million in 2005, with a pre-tax loss of $900,000. In the first half of the year, revenues were $9.9 million, with a loss of $400,000. Genetix, meanwhile, had sales of £6 million in the six months to June, with pre-tax profits of £1.2 million.

Apart from accessing Applied Imaging's technology, the deal provides Genetix with an expanded U.S. sales force, with corresponding opportunities for increasing sales of Applied Imaging's products in Europe.

Critics: Bayer Should Pay To Test GM Rice

The costs of testing European food for contamination with Bayer's unauthorized GM rice should be met by the company, insisted on Sept. 1 the environmentalist organization Friends of the Earth Europe. In the wake of the recent EU action to protect consumers against imports from the U.S. of rice containing traces of the experimental rice, the organization's GM campaigner, Clare Oxborrow, said: "When incidents like this happen, the industry must be forced to accept liability."

EU member states now are obliged to carry out testing of foods on their shelves. European authorities have published the official protocol for European laboratories to follow when testing foods for the GM rice, but have left the extent of testing to the discretion of each member state. However, countries will have to pay for the testing themselves, and each individual test can cost as much as 200 (US$220), said Friends of the Earth Europe.

"European taxpayers must not be made to pay," it said. "Instead, Bayer, the biotech company responsible for this pollution, must take full responsibility for its incompetence and foot the bill."

The EU's testing protocol, which sets out a construct-specific detection method using a real-time PCR assay, reflects the situation as of Aug. 31. But its testing center said it will continue to investigate the product, LLRICE601, particularly with respect to its molecular structure and to the possible occurrence of false positive and false negative test results, and will update the methods as soon as the need arises.

Meanwhile, a shipment of rice suspected of containing the illegal GM rice is being held in the Netherlands while Dutch authorities carry out testing.

The controversy over contamination of European rice imports with unauthorized GM strains intensified Sept. 5, with the revelation that traces of a GM rice from China had been found in Germany, France and the UK in the course of testing by Friends of the Earth Europe.

The environmental group's spokesman, Adrian Bebb, said: "These incidents must be prevented from happening again. Consumers in Europe deserve better than panic measures each time the latest crisis breaks. We need a radical overhaul of food testing in the EU to stop illegal and potentially unsafe genetically modified foods from entering the food chain."

Viacortis validates heart tissue viability

Viacortis, a EUREKA project being carried out in Lithuania, has developed new techniques to monitor the viability of heart tissue during heart surgery, so that cardiac surgeons have a real-time, comprehensive indication of how the heart is reacting.

A current trend in cardiac surgical practice is to work with an actively beating heart, rather than the more usual suppression of heart activity by low temperature. But carrying out surgical manipulation on a beating heart can lead to other problems if blood supply to the heart tissue itself is obstructed.

The Viacortis project has developed three techniques that can be used side by side to give detailed information on the way the heart tissue is coping, so that the surgeon has early warning signals if it is becoming too stressed.

Project coordinator Dr. Algimantas Krisciukaitis of the Kaunas University of Medicine in Lithuania, said, "The novelty of our method is that we developed quantitative criteria to measure heart damage. We can measure the electrical potential of the heart muscle, compare it at the same time with the biochemical activity of the tissue, and map its local heat pattern."

These three parameters together reveal early and small changes in the functional state of the heart tissue, and their exact location. The researchers said this gives vital information to the surgeon on the extent of tissue damage and the time he has available to complete the procedure.

Viacortis brought together the Biomedical Research Institute and the Heart Center of Kaunas University, plus the Laser Research Center of Vilnius University and Elinta Uab, a small company with expertise in multi-channel analysis of biological signals

A German partner was the Free University of Berlin's Institute for Medical Physics and Laser Medicine, which developed the equipment to measure fluorescence as an indicator of biochemical activity. The German institute also worked closely with Krisciukaitis' group in Kaunas to correlate fluorescence with electrical activity.

Because the Viacortis results introduce quantitative measurement of these indicators, they have made it possible to draw up optimum protocols for routine use of a range of surgical methods — showing clearly when urgency is great or when the heart tissue is not under excessive pressure.

The project has successfully demonstrated the use of the triple-monitoring system, which now is ready for further development of the equipment, followed by testing, approval and manufacture, before surgeons can make use of the extra support it can offer.

Oxonica, BD in development accord

Nanotechnology company Oxonica (Oxford, UK) reported signing a licensing agreement with BD (Becton, Dickinson and Co.; Franklin Lakes, New Jersey) for Oxonica's Nanoplex nanoparticle-based biomarker detection systems.

BD will help fund a joint research program focused on enabling Oxonica's technology to be used for rapid point-of-care (POC) diagnostic tests. BD also will invest the equivalent of $2 million in Oxonica stock.

David Browning, CEO of Oxonica, said, "BD is a leader in the clinical diagnostics field, and we look forward to working together to develop products for use in both hospital laboratory and point-of-care settings."

Oxonica's Nanoplex technology is based on gold nanoparticles with a unique label on the surface of the particle. This "tag" can be attached to a wide range of biological markers from infectious diseases. These diseases can then be identified by way of the tag being detected using a near-infrared laser-based reader through Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS).

The technology can provide ultra-sensitive and simultaneous detection of a number of diseases in the same test (multiplexing) at the point of care.

Oxonica said the ability to deliver high levels of multiplexing in a simple format gives the technology advantages over current diagnostic techniques, which typically use fluorescent and chemiluminescent markers.

The technology became part of the Oxonica family of products in the company's acquisition of Nanoplex (Mountain View, California) in December 2005. The technology was developed by Dr. Michael Natan, who is now president of Oxonica Healthcare.

Oxonica, spun-out from Oxford University in 1999, owns a portfolio of products for the target markets of healthcare, energy, materials and security.