Peaks of Interest

Thermo, Chata, and Cerno take top awards

Thermo Electron's (Waltham, Massachusetts) Finnigan Orbitrap mass spectrometer for small molecule research, drug discovery, proteomics, metabolite identification, and metabolomics was presented with the Editor's Choice award at Pittcon 2006 in Orlando, Florida.

Chata Biosystems' (Fort Collins, Colorado) Chem+Mix prepackaged HPLC mobile phases was presented with the silver plaque, and Cerno Bioscience's (Danbury, Connecticut) MassWorks acquisition software was presented with the Bronze plaque.

Honorable mentions included the model 1200 HPLC system from Agilent Technologies (Palo Alto, California), the 800 Mhz UltraShield Plus from Bruker Daltonics (Billerica, Massachusetts), the DyanPro Plate Reader from Wyatt Technology (Santa Barbara, California), the Labworks LIMS 5.9 from PerkinElmer (Shelton, Connecticut), and the Varian 500 APCI LC–MS system from Varian (Palo Alto, California).

Bruker BioSciences to acquire Bruker Optics

Bruker BioSciences (Billerica, Massachusetts) announced that it will acquire all of the stock of molecular spectroscopy company Bruker Optics Inc. (Billerica, Massachusetts) for $135 million. The agreement was signed following its unanimous approval by a special committee of independent directors.

The combined company will have a broad range of mass spectrometry, x-ray analysis, and molecular spectroscopy technology platforms to provide a combination of complementary systems for chemical and materials analysis. It will be a provider of instrumentation and molecular analysis solutions for a variety of industries including pharmaceutical and biotechnology research and development, proteomics and structural biology, and small molecule chemical analysis.

The acquisition is expected to be immediately accretive to Bruker BioSciences' 2006 and 2007 EPS.

Chinese pharmaceutical company selects Thermo

Thermo Electron announced that WuXi PharmaTech Co., Ltd. (Shanghai, China) has selected Watson LIMS to meet the specific data management requirements of its bioanalytical facilities.

WuXi PharmaTech serves many top pharmaceutical companies and biopharmaceutical companies in the world. The company provides discovery and development services, from lead identification to pre-clinical.

DataApex and Knauer announce cooperation

DataApex (Prague, Czech Republic) and Knauer (Berlin, Germany) recently announced signature of an OEM software agreement. Knauer will market an OEM version of DataApex's product Clarity Chromatography Software under the name ClarityChrom.

All of Knauer's Smartline instruments for analytical HPLC will be supported in the first release of ClarityChrom, planned for the second half of 2006.