New discovery services firm Biocius begins operations
The move follows the acquisition of BioTrove by Life Technologies earlier this month, which added the former firm's OpenArray high-throughput gene expression PCR platform to Life’s research services offering.
As a result Biocius, which is headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, holds all intellectual property and technology rights to the RapidFire mass spectrometry platform that BioTrove launched earlier this year.
The technology, which is used for absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) assays, enables automated sample preparation at a rate of up to six seconds per sample to reduce the time it takes to conduct high throughput assays.
RapidFire allows the analysis of a range of otherwise intractable targets like triglycerides, lipids, prostaglandins, steroids, neurotransmitters, anti-fungals and anti-infectives, which are difficult to study using traditional methods such as fluorescence or radiolabelling.
However, Biocius does not intend to rely solely on the RapidFire technology for its business according to CEO Jeffrey Leathe.
“Biocius is well capitalized and we plan to maximize on our strengths in drug discovery products and services to aggressively expand our portfolio and add value to our many collaborators in the pharma and biotech community.
COO Can Özbal agreed, adding that: “New products in the pipeline will both enhance the workflows of our existing pharma and biotech customers, and allow us to expand that customer base with technologies also suited to our clients at academic and government institutions.”
