SeraCare Life Sciences Inc. paid off its $10 million revolving credit facility with GE Capital and inked a purchase and sale agreement for its former headquarters in West Bridgewater, Mass., for $1.35 million, according to a filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
Research & Development
MIT’s Deshpande Center doles out $600,000 in grants
MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation is doling out $600,000 in grants to eight research teams at the institute to foster the development of early-stage technologies in the composite materials, diagnostics, disease therapies, drug discovery, diabetes treatment, high power electronics, energy efficient displays and sensors fields.
The cash will fund proof-of-concept research and validation, according to a press release, helping recipients assess and reduce the technical and market risks associated with the inventions.
The grants go to:
Mass Device Q&A: Dave Kroll
Dave Kroll, the founder and principal of Kroll Associates, works out of his office in western Massachusetts, which, according to him, proves there is life in design and product development beyond Worcester and the Greater Boston area.
In fact, Kroll sees his distance from Boston as an advantage, since he can also tap New York, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire and beyond for new work.
He has clients in and around Boston, sure — one of his biggest is in Waltham — but his ties to New England universities, contractors and manufacturers, and his persistence in maintaining a presence with clients, either virtually or through office visits, keeps him on top of the industry.
Jack Szostak, Harvard Medical School professor, wins Nobel Prize for medicine
A professor at Harvard Medical School is among three recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering work in the field of genetic research.
Jack Szostak, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, shared the prize with Elizabeth Blackburn, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and Carol Greider of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
SeraCare lands $11 million in government contracts
SeraCare Life Sciences Inc. won a pair of new HIV research contracts from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health and renewed a third NIH contract for a combined $10.8 million.
The Mildford, Mass.-based service provider said the new, five-year, $3.6 million CDC contract is part of the agency’s HIV-1 Rapid Test Proficiency Program. SeraCare will distribute HIV-I positive and negative blood plasma to the 650 labs participating in the study to help them assess the accuracy of their tests.
MassDevice Q&A: Richard Schumacher
Richard Schumacher is no stranger to successful start-ups. The Pressure BioSciences founder, president and CEO had a hand in five early-stage life science ventures, including Boston Biomedica.
Perceptive Informatics upgrades its image with Optasia Medical
Perceptive Informatics and Optasia Medical Inc. signed an imaging measurement deal for studies of osteoarthritis in knees.
The agreement calls for Cambridge, Mass.-based Perceptive, which is the clinical trial data management arm of Parexel International Corp., to use Sudbury, Mass.-based Optasia’s KneeAnalyzer software to enhance image analysis of the knee in osteoarthritis patients.
Parexel Q4 profits plunge 76 percent
Parexel International Corp. ended the year on a down note, taking a $12 million tax adjustment to its bottom line, which combined with slow sales for a 76 percent drop in profits for the three months ended June 30.
The Waltham-based contract research organization reported $6.2 million in net income on $292 million in sales for the quarter, compared to $25 million on $332 million in sales for the same period last year.
For the full year, the company reported a $39 million on profit on $1.2 billion in sales, compared to $65 million on $1.1 billion in sales last year.
Charles River Labs inks deals as Q2 revenues slide
Charles River Laboratories International Inc. said it plans to acquire a provider of automated digital imaging software and also announced a strategic partnership with a venture capital firm that could add nearly four dozen early-stage pharmaceutical and biotech companies as contract research clients.
Other deals also may be on the way, as the Wilmington, Mass.-based contract research firm filed a shelf registration late Tuesday to sell stock and other securities. Proceeds would be intended for “general corporate purposes, including including working capital, acquisitions and retirement of debt,” the company said.
Caliper’s Q2 sales slip but net loss narrows
Caliper Life Sciences Inc. posted second-quarter sales of $32.1 million, down 5.6 percent compared with $34 million during the same period last year.
But increased consumable sales, reduced inventory and cost-cutting measures brought the Hopkinton, Mass.-based lab equipment and services provider closer to breaking even. Caliper posted a net loss of $4.1 million on the three months ended June 30, compared with a net loss of $6.7 million during the second quarter of 2008, a 39.3 percent reduction.
Obama taps genetics pioneer Francis Collins to lead NIH
President Barack Obama tapped Francis Collins, the discoverer of the genes that cause such pernicious afflictions as cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Collins, 59, also led the government project to map the human genome, authored a best-seller detailing scientific reasons to believe in a higher power and is a widely respected research scientist.
If confirmed — as is expected, the newspaper reported — Collins would step into one of the most powerful positions in science, commanding 27 institutes and a $30 billion annual budget.
