Diagnostics & Imaging Week Contributing Writers

Imperial College (London) will become the first university in Europe to spin off its technology transfer office through a public flotation. Imperial Innovations Group has raised 25 million ($46.3 million) through a placement, subject to completing an initial public offering (IPO) on the Alternative Investment Market, which will raise another 1.5 million.

The placement consists of 6.8 million shares at 3.65 each, while another 410,958 shares are available in the IPO. This will give Imperial Innovations a market capitalization of 181.3 million on admission to AIM on July 31.

Imperial College will retain a 59.1% stake and is subject to a lock-up for the first year after flotation, and to the condition that it does not reduce its shareholding below 50.1% in the two years following.

The technology transfer company has an agreement with Imperial College, sealed in April 2005, giving it exclusive rights to Imperial's research until 2020. At the end of May there were 90 licensing agreements and 58 spinout companies in Imperial Innovations' portfolio, with an unaudited value of 31.5 million. Around 40% of the value is attributable to holdings in one company, Ceres Power Holdings.

Susan Searle, CEO of Imperial Innovations, said the funds would provide increased ability to maximize the value of the technology it spins out. "We can make larger investments and more investments," she told Diagnostics & Imaging Week's sister publication, BioWorld International. "We would like to take a larger share in investment rounds but we are still seeking to co-invest."

While the UK government is encouraging universities to commercialize publicly-funded research, they do not have the skills or the money to fully exploit their intellectual property. Some have signed exclusive deals with quoted technology management companies such as IP Group and Amphion Innovations, while Sheffield University has gone part-way down the route pioneered by Imperial Innovations, spinning out its life sciences research through BioFusion (Sheffield, UK), an AIM-quoted company designed for this purpose.

No such quoted technology commercialization firms exist elsewhere in Europe. Last month, the European Investment Fund announced the formation of a 30 million venture capital fund with IP Group to invest in university spinouts and said it intended to negotiate more funds based on this model.

White blood cell testing system rolled out

HemoCue (Angelholm, Sweden) has unveiled what it said is an entirely new single-analyte point-of-care (POC) testing system for determination of total white blood cell count.

The new system was on display at last week's American Association of Clinical Chemistry (Washington) annual meeting in Chicago. The company said the test is so simple that it can be performed in any physician's office within minutes and will be, it added, "a valuable tool in the diagnosis of bacterial infections."

The HemoCue WBC testing system for total white blood cell (WBC) count will be used to rapidly diagnose infections and will substantially improve quality in primary care, the company said. Instead of sending blood samples to a reference lab, the system will provide immediate and reliable results with the same precision and accuracy as a lab test, onsite and within minutes, HemoCue said.

Since an increased total WBC count is typically seen in patients with bacterial infections, HemoCue WBC will assist physicians in the decision on whether to prescribe antibiotics or not. The company said over-prescription of antibiotics is a major concern resulting in an increasing number of bacterial strains being resistant to antibiotics.

"Our new point-of-care system for measuring total WBC will help physicians prescribe antibiotics to patients in need of it without unnecessary delay and to avoid prescribing it to patients where it has no effect," says Stellan Lindberg, director of R&D at HemoCue. "So far we have presented HemoCue WBC to a small number of experts at large central hospital laboratories and to physicians in primary care settings. They have been very impressed by the simplicity and accuracy of our system."

The WBC system is based on HemoCue's proven cuvette technology and is specifically designed for receiving a waived categorization under the U.S. government's Clinical Laboratory Improvements Amendments program. The system will be tested on a large scale in the beginning of next year by a number of clinics in Sweden and the U.S., with anticipated commercialization in 2Q07.

HemoCue is owned by EQT, a leading Northern Europe private equity group.

Genome analysis kit launched

Kreatech Biotechnology (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) reported the launch of its Genome-pULSe, arrayCGH Whole Genome Amplification and Labeling Kit, the latest addition to the company's product portfolio for arrayCGH analysis.

This kit combines Qiagen's (Venlo, the Netherlands) whole-genome amplification (WGA) technology, which allows amplification of very small amounts of genomic DNA isolated from tissue or cells, with Kreatech's ULS reagents necessary to label these samples for arrayCGH analysis, thus offering what the latter firm characterized as "a more complete solution to scientists carrying out arrayCGH analysis." The Genome-pULSe Kit is available with the ULS labeling molecule bound to Cy3 and Cy5 dyes licensed from GE Healthcare (Chalfont St. Giles, UK). The WGA technology included in the kit is the REPLI-g kit from Qiagen.

Kreatech said ArrayCGH analysis of particular samples, such as small-needle tumor biopsies, can be limited by the small amount of sample available. It said that traditional methods of genomic DNA amplification include the time-consuming process of creating EBV-transformed cell lines followed by whole-genome amplification using random or degenerate oligonucleotide-primed polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

However, the company noted that PCR-based methods can generate non-specific amplification artefacts, resulting in the incomplete coverage of loci. In addition, conventional methods that are based on enzymatic incorporation of modified nucleotides used to label the amplified DNA for subsequent microarray analysis could further increase the bias in locus representation.

The Genome-pULSe Kit delivers a novel procedure for the uniform amplification and subsequent direct (non-enzymatic) labeling of whole-genome DNA from small samples, a method designed to provide a quick and highly reproducible amplification and labeling procedure for arrayCGH analysis.

Kreatech's vice president of commercial operations, Brent Keller, said, "This is the first amplification and labeling kit available for arrayCGH analysis that enables customers to detect genetic aberrations without introducing bias during the amplification and labeling unlike conventional amplification and enzymatic labeling procedures."