A Medical Device Daily

Beckman Coulter (Fullerton, California) reported acquiring an in vitro diagnostics license to all real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) patents and pending patent applications owned or controlled by Roche Diagnostics (Indianapolis), a division of F. Hoffmann-La Roche (Basel, Switzerland), for a one-time fee of $27.5 million plus royalties on sales of all licensed products.

Beckman Coulter CEO Scott Garrett said, “We recently announced that Beckman Coulter reached a settlement with Applera [Norwalk, Connecticut], resulting in licenses to Beckman Coulter of the intellectual property needed for development of real-time PCR instrumentation for diagnostics. This additional license from Roche gives our company the intellectual property required to meet the molecular testing needs of routine labs for an automated, fully integrated system.”

Garrett said development of the products, including instruments and diagnostic kits, would begin immediately, with initial launch expected in “two to three years.”

Beckman Coulter manufactures biomedical testing ins-trument systems, tests and supplies that automate laboratory processes, from medical research and clinical trials to laboratory diagnostics and point-of-care testing.

Millipore (Billerica, Massachusetts) reported completing its acquisition of Serologicals (Norcross, Georgia), following approval by Serologicals' shareholders last week.

First disclosed in April, the deal calls for Millipore to acquire Serologicals for $31.55 per share, or about $1.4 billion, in an all-cash transaction, and the assumption of Serologicals debt (Medical Device Daily, April 26, 2006). Millipore said that the acquisition transforms it “into a life science industry leader” with annual revenues of about $1.4 billion.

“The strategic combination of Millipore and Serologicals will enable us to leverage the complementary capabilities and resources of both companies,” said Martin Madaus, CEO/chairman of Millipore. “Our combined global field organization of approximately 1,200 professionals – which includes some of the most technically advanced experts in the industry – will have the ability to sell a broad portfolio of innovative products and further expand our presence in emerging international markets. We now have a well-balanced growth profile.”

Millipore said that the acquisition extends its bioprocess footprint into upstream biopharmaceutical manufacturing and accelerates its revenue and profitability with the addition of high-margin consumable products.

With the addition of Serologicals' R&D capabilities, Millipore said it would be able to pursue new markets, accelerate investment in new products and bring together the expertise of both companies.

Millipore is organized in two operating divisions: it says its Bioprocess Division enables pharmaceutical and biotechs to improve their manufacturing productivity, ensure the quality of drugs and scale up the production of difficult-to-manufacture biologics; its Bioscience division provides reagents, kits and other technologies and products for life science R&D.

In other dealmaking news:

• AMI Semiconductor (AMIS; Pocatello, Idaho), a unit of AMIS Holdings, a designer and manufacturer of integrated mixed-signal products and structured digital products for the medical and industrial sectors, reported completing the purchase of certain assets of Starkey Lab-oratories ' (Eden Prairie, Minnesota) integrated circuit design center for about $6 million in cash.

AMIS acquired certain assets from the Starkey design center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that designs low-power, audiology-integrated circuits used in Starkey hearing aids. With the acquisition, 20 mixed-signal and DSP designers will join AMIS to continue the development of DSP-based, mixed-signal ICs to complement AMIS' existing staff. AMI and Starkey also entered into an agreement whereby AMI will be the major supplier of silicon for Starkey's hearing aid products.

“The acquisition and supplier agreement are designed to leverage the strengths of each company,” said Robert Tong, AMIS senior vice president, medical and wireless group.

Starkey is a provider of digital hearing systems, including custom and standard devices, protection products, instrumentation and unique business solutions. Starkey owns the Audibel, Micro-Tech, NuEar, Omni and Qualitone companies and operates facilities in 24 countries.

AMIS develops integrated mixed-signal products and structured digital products. Its European corporate office is in Oudenaarde, Belgium.

• Rosetta Biosoftware (Seattle) reported that the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) licensed the Rosetta Resolver system to study gene regulation networks at the UNL Center for Biotechnology. Terms of the licensing deal were not disclosed.

Resolver supports gene expression studies by enabling collaboration across organizations and integration with existing bioinformatics tools and resources.

Yelena Shevelenko, vice president and general manager of Rosetta, described the Resolver system as “a scalable solution designed to support collaboration within and between organizations.”

“For high-throughput plant gene expression and regulation studies, we need a highly efficient and effective workflow,” said Professor Steve Ladunga at the UNL. “As an important part of this workflow, the Rosetta Resolver system will provide a means for sophisticated communication between several computational and experimental biologists collaborating on data-intensive projects. The Resolver system will empower us to focus on innovative research and allows us to integrate our own software development for the study of gene regulatory networks in Arabidopsis and crops as well as the chromatin remodeling events that influence gene expression.”

The Rosetta Resolver system is distributed by Agilent Technologies (Palo Alto, California).

UNL Center for Biotechnology promotes molecular life sciences research and is supported by the Nebraska Research Initiative funds allocated through the Center for Biotechnology and by funds from the National Science Foundation.