IVGN-ABI in 'Omics Collaboration

Invitrogen and Applied Biosystems today announced a strategic agreement to create and co-market a suite of reagents for proteomic analysis. The deal combines ABI's iTRAQ and ICAT labeling technologies, and Invitrogen's SILAC labeling technologies for metabolomic analysis. For fast-growing Invitrogen, the alliance gives it access to Applied Biosystems' installed base of instruments for protein and metabolomic analysis. For ABI, which has been struggling to find growth as its sophisticated DNA sequencing instruments become the laboratory equivalent of high end PCs in life-sciences laboratories, this deal gives it additional menu to add to the mass-spectrometry instruments it manufactures in a joint venture with MDS Sciex.

New Biology Economy insight: This is the kind of deal that even the big companies must make in the fast-moving molecular biology tools market, where a premium is placed on coopetition and where reagents, the labatory equivalent of software for computers, are as important as providers of revenue streams after the instrments are sold. The winner in this deal is Invitrogen. Financially, with no data provided, the next few quarters will show if this deal expands the market for either company.

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A Wall Street Journal report today that Agilent is shopping its semiconductor products division only serves to affirm the obvious. While Agilent's semiconductor products have contributed almost a third of revenues, they have done so by dragging down the company's bottom line. Agilent currently has four business divisions -- test and measurement, life sciences and chemical analysis, automated test,and semiconductor products.

Test and Measurement and LSCA have been growing at double-digit pace and accounted for some 60 percent of Agilent revenues in the quarter ending Jan. 31 while semiconductor revenues fell 5 percent and automated test dropped 30 percent.

New Biology Economy insight: Agilent's LSCA unit has been growing and is showing a significant internal return on investment for Agilent, which operates as a holding company, with a core unit providing services and support to its business segments. Agilent may not own any of the leading cutting edge life-sciences tools, but the company is moving to consolidate the informatics space and to offer services around these industries. It is taking a low-risk strategy that executives say takes a long-term view on the evolving market.

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Pig Genome Data Released – The Beijing Genomics Institute and the Danish Committee of Pig Breeding and Production released sequence data on the genomes of five different domestic pig breeds from Europe and China. The data were generated from a four-year-old $10 million collaboration. The data indicate that pigs are genetically closer to man than normally used laboratory animals. This has important implications for the use of pigs in medical research and drug testing. The data from this project will be incorporated into the next stage of the international Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium where a draft sequence map of 6-fold genome coverage is planned to be produced.

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IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) today announced a collaboration that will take from two to three years to create a detailed model of the circuitry in the neocortex, mapping neurons to the 8,000 processors in the machine, and then – if it works -- running simulations of molecular-level brain activity.

New Biology Economy insight: The brain is one of the frontiers of the new biology era. This IBM project begins to tackle just a part of the brain and best serves to illustrate the magnitude of the challenge that lies in front of biologists. Modeling pathways and biological activities are not trivial pursuits. They are costly and test the envelope on technology.