By Mary Welch

Aclara BioSciences Inc. registered for an initial public offering that it expects will raise $97.7 million.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company plans to raise the money in order to fund research and development activities, possible acquisitions as well as investments in technology. Currently there are 13.9 million shares of stock issued.

The number of shares in the IPO and the expected price range were not included in the filing and will be determined later. All the shares will be sold by Aclara. Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown and Warburg Dillon Read LLC, both of New York, will act as joint book-running managers for the offering. U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, of Minneapolis, will act as co-manager.

According to the company's filing, Aclara said it is the only "microfluidics, or lab-on-a-chip, company with access to the wide range of technology and intellectual property required to broadly address the genomics and pharmaceutical drug screening markets."

The company, the filing said, focuses on the major segments of the genomics market - DNA sequencing, genotyping and gene expression analysis - as well as key applications in pharmaceutical drug screening. It also intends to develop products for industrial process control and sensing systems as well as clinical diagnostics.

The filing stated that the company's designs for microfluidic chips will enable researchers to perform chemical and biological measurements rapidly in a miniaturized automated format.

A spin-off from Soane Technologies Inc., of Hayward, Calif., Aclara was incorporated in 1995 and changed its name to Aclara in 1998. According to the filing, the company has $7.8 million in cash as of Sept. 30. It reported total revenue of $2.1 million and a net loss of $9.53 million for the first nine months of last year. Since its inception, Aclara has spent more than $16 million in research and development.

In March the company completed a $15 million private placement aimed at helping it commercialize its microfluidic chip technology for genetic analysis and high-throughput drug screening. Later, Burrill Agbio Capital Fund, of San Francisco, invested $3 million, bringing the total placement to $18 million. (See BioWorld Today, March 8, 1999, p. 1.).

The company has a deal with PE Corp., of Norwalk, Conn., to collaborate on the development of genetic-analysis systems utilizing Aclara's microfluidics with PE's portfolio of genetic-analysis technologies. PE owns about 1.7 million Aclara shares.

Other stockholders include Alta Partners, of San Francisco, with 1.5 million shares; Ampersand Ventures, of Wellesley, Mass., with about 2.8 million shares; Burrill & Co., with 1.1 million shares; and CMEA Ventures, of San Francisco, with 1.2 million shares.