In New York, Bio-Rad Laboratories acquired one of its rivals, RainDance Technologies. Details on the acquisition amount or impact for RainDance employees were not disclosed. Bio-Rad hopes the acquisition will expand its nucleic acid detection applications for its life science and clinical diagnostics clients. RainDance has several partnerships including Myriad Genetics and Pacific Biosciences, but it was not disclosed what would happen to those partnerships with the acquisition.
Bio-Rad CEO Norman Schwartz told GenomeWeb “The RainDance intellectual property portfolio will extend Bio-Rad’s reach into next-generation sequencing applications and strengthen its position in the area of droplet digital PCR.” Simply put, PCR is a technique used to copy a piece of DNA and generating millions of copies of a DNA sequence.
Bio-Rad’s last big buy was in 2014 when it purchased GnuBio for $110 million. It is planning to launch a new sequencing system from the GnuBio technology in late 2017.