Agilent Technologies acquires Lab901

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced it has acquired Lab901, a leading electrophoresis equipment and consumables company based in Edinburgh, U.K. The company's automated electrophoresis products are used for DNA, RNA and protein analysis. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Lab901 develops and markets a TapeStation benchtop electrophoresis instrument, ScreenTape plastic-based consumables and associated reagents. Customers include scientists in pharma, bio-pharma R&D and quality control, as well as academic and government institutions. Founded in 2001, Lab901 employs around 45 people.

"With the addition of Lab901's outstanding technology and talented team, Agilent can now address customer needs across the entire span of electrophoresis life science applications - from semi-automated to 96-well-plate compatible workflows," said Patrick Kaltenbach, vice president of Agilent's Liquid Phase Separations business. "Alongside our existing BioAnalyzer platform and the Agilent G7100 Electrophoresis System, the Lab901 ScreenTape system provides a very versatile, automated and scalable throughput gel electrophoresis solution for a wide range of applications."

Lab901's ScreenTape system is a fast and convenient benchtop automated system for gel electrophoresis. Customers simply load their samples and the ScreenTape consumable into the compact TapeStation instrument and within as little as one minute per sample, fully analyzed results for protein, RNA and DNA samples are displayed.

With its unique combination of automation, ease of use and scalable throughput, the system is ideally suited for sample quality control in next-generation sequencing and gene expression workflows as well as protein electrophoresis and DNA fragment analysis in core labs. In these applications, time to result and reproducibility of data is critical.

"We have always recognized the strong synergy between our two companies," said Joel Fearnley, Lab901's former CEO, who will join Agilent Technologies along with the rest of his employees. "Lab901's innovative technology, exciting products and experienced team are a perfect fit with Agilent's culture and pioneering history. We look forward to offering our global customers an unrivalled portfolio of advanced products to address their electrophoresis needs."

The TapeStation and ScreenTapes will complement Agilent´s strong electrophoresis portfolio. Launched in 1999, the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer was the first commercially available instrument to use microfluidics technology for the analysis of biological samples. The 2100 Bioanalyzer has become the market-leading device for RNA and DNA QC in microarray, qPCR and next-generation workflows. Agilent has just recently extended the chip supply agreement for this platform and will continue to develop new applications for it.

Newly introduced in 2009, Agilent's G7100 Capillary Electrophoresis System is one of the most versatile benchtop electrophoresis platforms on the market. It is compatible with a wide range of detectors ranging from UV (ultraviolet absorbance) to LIF (laser-induced fluorescence) to MS (mass spectrometry) to CCDs (contactless conductivity detectors). In particular the G7100's seamless integration with Agilent's comprehensive mass-spectrometry portfolio, makes it a perfect fit for small molecule, protein and metabolomics research and validation.