Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

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• Expands specialty diagnostics portfolio with attractive molecular diagnostics capabilities, including infectious disease testing • Complements leading life sciences offering with innovative sample preparation, assay and bioinformatics technologies  • Creates significant value and is expected to be immediately accretive to adjusted earnings per share after close WALTHAM, Mass. and VENLO, The Netherlands – March 3, 2020 – Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (NYSE: TMO), the world leader in serving science, and QIAGEN N.V. (NYSE: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA), a leading global provider of molecular diagnostics and sample preparation technologies, today announced that their boards of directors, as well as the managing board of QIAGEN N.V., have unanimously approved Thermo Fisher’s proposal to acquire QIAGEN for €39 per share in cash. The offer price represents a premium of approximately 23% to the closing price of QIAGEN’s common stock on the Frankfurt Prime Standard on Ma...

At the Bio-IT World Conference last week, Intel unveiled a new website, dubbed Optimized Code, that offers access to versions of several popular open-source bioinformatics analysis tools that the company has optimized to run on Intel Xeon processors, with the aim of generating results faster and more efficiently than standard iterations of these solutions. The first set of applications that the company has released specifically for genomic analysis include optimized versions of  the Broad Institute's Genome Analysis Toolkit ; Blast algorithms for nucleotide- and protein-based sequence searching; BWA-ALN , software for mapping low-divergent sequences to a reference genome; and MPI-HMMER , protein sequence analysis software. The company has also released optimized code for AMBER and NAMD, both of which are used for simulating the molecular dynamics of biomolecular systems. The Intel website provides performance numbers for each of the optimized codes as well as directions for h...

Qiagen has purchased the assets of Biobase, a Wolfenbüttel, Germany-based provider of curated biological databases, for an undisclosed sum. Qiagen said that Biobase will be renamed Qiagen Wolfenbüttel. Also, Michael Tysiak, BioBase's CEO, will join Qiagen as general manager of the newly purchased company. Founded in 2007, Biobase provides access to curated data assembled by subject matter experts and organized in an accessible and easy to search manner. Its databases support projects focused on functional and gene regulation analyses, variant annotation, pharmacogenetics-based analysis, and more. Among its repositories are the Human Gene Mutation Database (HGMD), which offers access to information on inherited disease mutations; GenomeTrac, which contains data on pathogenic variants; the PharmacoGenomic Mutation Database, which serves as a resource for locating variants that affect drug response; and the Transcription Factor Binding Sites database, which contains information o...

In continuation to BioSaga's pursuit to cover the PerkinElmer's Layoff Saga The Layoffs Continue...  The story now is never-ending, here is the latest! PerkinElmer reduced its headcount by 74 employees in the fourth quarter of 2013, bringing the total headcount reduction during the year to 430, it disclosed in its Form 10K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. During the fourth quarter, the company approved a restructuring plan to shift certain R&D activity resources to a newly opened Center for Innovation, resulting in the 74 layoffs. All employees were notified of their termination by Dec. 29, 2013. A total of $3.9 million was recorded in severance payments related to the layoffs in Q4 2013, PerkinElmer said, adding remaining severance payments of $2.0 million for workforce reductions will be "substantially completed" by the end of Q2 2014. The company had previously disclosed it laid off 30 employees in Q3; 265 employees ...

Accelrys has bought Qumas, a provider of cloud-based and on-premise enterprise compliance software for regulatory and quality operations in regulated industries including the life sciences, for $50 million. Accelrys said that the added intellectual property extends its informatics portfolio by providing document and process management compliance solutions that improve its ability to help customers reduce regulatory risks and quality costs, improve compliance, and increase operational efficiency across their product development lifecyles. Operating from offices in Cork, Ireland and New Jersey, Qumas provides an electronic document management application with related research and development submission and QA documentation packages based on customer and industry requirements and best practices. Its business process management applications include corrective action/preventive action, audit, change control, deviation, complaint, and more. For the last two decades, the company has been ...

Illumina today announced it signed a definitive agreement to acquire clinical software firm NextBio. NextBio, based in Santa Clara, Calif., provides platforms to aggregate and analyze large amounts of phenotypic and genomic data for research and clinical applications. It currently has customers at more than 50 commercial entities and academic institutions. By acquiring the firm, Illumina "will be able to offer customers enterprise-level bioinformatics solutions that accelerate the discovery of new associations between the human genome and disease, and ultimately, enable the application of those discoveries within healthcare," according to a company statement. NextBio's platform allows customers to compare experimental data against existing data sets using a correlation engine, enabling them to discover new associations. It uses "highly scalable" software-as-a-service enterprise technology and is capable of analyzing petabytes of data. Illumina plans ...

Qiagen has acquired CLC Bio, a privately held bioinformatics software company headquartered in Aarhus, Denmark. The news was first reported on AllSeq's blog . This is the second bioinformatics company that Qiagen has purchased this year. In May, it bought Ingenuity Systems for $105 million in cash to offer its life science and clinical customers a complete and integrated workflow for its PCR- and next-generation sequencing-based molecular testing solutions ( BI 5/3/2013 ). Qiagen has been making some interesting moves lately, slowly building an end to end sequencing solution. They’ve already established themselves as the market leaders in sample prep, but then they started acquiring the missing pieces. First they bought Intelligent BioSystems in June 2012, giving them access to a sequencing platform built with the clinical market in mind (fairly standard SBS chemistry, relatively fast runs and multiple flow cells to obviate the need for sample multiplexing). Then they ...

Qiagen said this week that it acquired Ingenuity Systems for $105 million in cash in order to offer its life science and clinical customers a complete and integrated workflow for its PCR- and next-generation sequencing-based molecular testing solutions — from sample preparation to data interpretation. Under its new parent, Ingenuity will continue to operate out of its offices in Redwood City, Calif., and retain all 120 current employees, while CEO Jake Leschly takes on new responsibilities within Qiagen's life science business unit. Ingenuity will also continue to develop and offer products under its existing licensing scheme. Its portfolio includes a knowledgebase of curated genomic variants; Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, its web-based application for modeling and analyzing biological pathways; Ingenuity Variant Analysis, which selects clinically relevant genomic variants from NGS data ( BI 1/13/2012 ); and Ingenuity iReport, its software for reporting the results of gene ...

BGI-Shenzhen today said that it has extended its offer to acquire Complete Genomics for around $118 million until midnight New York City time on Dec. 14. BGI's tender offer to acquire all of the shares of Complete Genomics was previously scheduled to expire today. As of the close of business last night approximately 15.4 million shares of Complete Genomics' common stock, or 44 percent of its outstanding shares, were tendered and not withdrawn. The extension of the offer last night coincided with a letter Illumina sent to Complete Genomics' board of directors urging them to reconsider Illumina's offer to acquire the firm for around $123 million. Earlier this week Illumina confirmed that it had made an unsolicited offer of $3.30 per share to acquire Complete Genomics. That offer is 5 percent higher than the price agreed between BGI and Complete Genomics. Complete Genomics turned down Illumina's offer saying that it would likely be turned down by regulator...

Courtesy Xconomy After merging with Symyx Technologies in 2010, acquiring Contur Sofware in 2011, and buying VelQuest earlier this year, San Diego scientific software developer Accelrys says today it is buying Aegis Analytical. Accelrys is paying $30 million in cash for Aegis, a company based in Lafayette, CO, (near Boulder) that makes software used to monitor biotech product development and manufacturing processes. In a  statement  today, Accelrys says the deal helps to further expand its suite of software used to manage the life cycle of innovation among pharmaceutical companies and in other industries. Aegis has about 40 full-time and contract employees, and “the idea is to keep the business in Boulder and fairly intact,” Accelrys CFO Michael Piraino told me during a phone interview earlier this afternoon. Aegis CEO Robert Di Scipio will stay with the merged company through the transition to new ownership. About two-thirds of Acce...

wwwtilda Data manager in computational material science Introduction Tilde (wwwtilda, ~) is a data manager in cheminformatics and computational material science. The nowadays situation in these disciplines with a plenty of incompatible data formats is rather confusing. Furthermore a new approach to the scientific data verification and exchange is desired because the traditional peer-reviewed journals and their supplementary materials sections do not solve this task properly. Therefore Tilde aims to simplify data processing and exchanging for the scientists, dealing with popular computer simulation packages in material science (e.g.  VASP ,  CRYSTAL ,  WIEN2K  etc). Now the text outputs of these programs can be collected, and the calculated results therein can be visualized. The example focus is on phonon properties of the crystalline materials: vibrational spectra, band structures, densities of states, vibrational patterns visualization etc. Moreover Ti...

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, announced today the acquisition of the business assets of  Ariadne Genomics , a provider of pathway analysis tools and semantic technologies for life science researchers. Ariadne will be integrated with Elsevier's Corporate Markets division. "Ariadne Genomics' pathway analysis tools and semantic technologies integrate research findings from across multiple content sources providing a deeper understanding of biological pathways and disease progression. Ariadne's products improve research productivity and outcomes for life science researchers by delivering new insights for potential interventions, therapies and cures," said Alexander van Boetzelaer, Managing Director of Elsevier Corporate Markets. "Ariadne brings to Elsevier an information offering in the biology domain and a passionate and dedicated team of life science professionals. Ariadne's team ...

For Indian laboratories, the decision to implement  informatics applications that support compliance with 21 CFR Part 11 delivers multiple benefits. They are protecting their access to regulated markets in the US and other countries while implementing electronic processes and procedures that can reduce costs while enhancing their ability to deliver world class results.

Persistent Systems Ltd (PSL) has signed an agreement to acquire Agilent Technologies' software marketing and development business unit based in Grenoble, France. The acquisition is expected to be final by August 1, after which the unit will be called Persistent Systems, France. Dr Anand Deshpande, Chairman and Managing Director, PSL said the acquisition will contribute to Persistent's thrust in the life sciences and healthcare markets and also give it a presence in Europe. Around 30 domain experts from Agilent will come on board once the transaction is completed and more may be added, he said. The Agilent business is now focused on supplying data acquisition and control software for scientific instruments to the life sciences, environmental, energy, applied research and other markets. Currently, PSL's Life Sciences business contributes 10-12 per cent to its topline and was worth $20 million in FY 2011. The team here includes over 40 domain experts and more than 500 softw...

Belgian biotech firm Galapagos today announced its BioFocus service division has extended a contract with Amgen through 2012 to include target discovery and validation work. The extension will include the use of BioFocus' target discovery platform to deliver novel targets to support Amgen's therapeutic programs. Galapagos will receive €2 million ($2.6 million) in research fees in the first year, under the terms of the deal. It is also eligible for access fees and milestone payments. Originally forged in 2002, the collaboration between BioFocus, which Galapagos acquired in 2005, and Amgen involves identifying new molecules against drug targets. The partnership was extended in 2006 and 2008. BioFocus' discovery platform includes the use of  in vitro  and cell-based screening, structural biology, and chemogenomic and informatics tools.

Linguamatics is currently seeking a talented post graduate with experience of natural language processing to work on leading edge text mining products. You will be responsible for developing and maintaining resources for domain specific adaptation of real-time semantic search software based on Natural Language Processing. Working closely with application scientists and the development team, you will ensure that the combination of software and resources satisfies customer requirements. This will include developing linguistic patterns, and programs to transform domain specific terminologies into common formats and keep them up-to-date. You will be working on life science applications, and some knowledge of the Pharmaceutical or Healthcare industry would be useful.In addition to resource and application development, you will be expected to contribute to ongoing UK or EU funded research projects as part of the research and resource development team. You will have strong communication ski...

Thomson Reuters today announced that it has acquired GeneGo, a leading provider of biology and disease information, analytics, and decision support solutions for pharmaceutical research and development. Effective immediately, GeneGo will become part of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition enables Thomson Reuters to provide the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic research communities with solutions that provide better understanding of the underlying mechanism of disease and potential therapies. GeneGo’s scientific expertise and assets in biology-driven drug discovery complement the Thomson Reuters life sciences portfolio that covers drug pipeline competitive intelligence, patents, and chemistry. do you wish to know more?

GeneGo today said that Agilent's GeneSpring bioinformatics solution has been integrated with GeneGo's MetaCore. The collaboration was announced in connection with the newest version of Agilent's GeneSpring. Agilent said today introduced GeneSpring GX 11.5, which can interpret microarray, proteomics, and metabolomics experiments together for the first time. The newest version includes a direct connection to the MetaCore pathway analysis engine, enabling users to seamlessly upload expression data analyzed in GeneSpring, said GeneGo. "MetaCore can concurrently visualize multiple types of data and will be able to take advantage of this new functionality in GeneSpring which will be very helpful to our joint customers," Julie Bryant, VP of business development for St. Joseph, Mich.-based GeneGo, said in a statement.

A manager or a senior bioinformatician is required. Qualifications:- A Master degree in biology, bioinformatics (or a related discipline), or equivalent experience in bioinformatics in the pharmaceutical or biotech industry.  An MS or Ph.D. is strongly preferred. Required Skills:-Strong technical, analytical, and problem  solving skills, Strong communication abilities, A dedication to software development best practices and methodologies Experience: - 2+ years experience developing software solutions in the pharmaceutical R&D or biotech sector, Demonstrated ability with  several of the following: Java, Java/J2EE,  .NET (VB, C#, ASP),  Sharepoint, Oracle, JDBC, SQL,  Unix/Linux, Windows,  Mastery of at least one programming language/platform. Company:- MNC Bioinformatics. Location:- Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. Salary:- 15-20 lacks. Further relevant information can be accessed from t...