Life Technologies Acquires Dutch Protein Purification Company

Life Technologies Corp. (Carlsbad, CA, USA) has acquired BAC, BV (Naarden, The Netherlands), a market leader in the discovery, development, and manufacture of protein purification products. The acquisition enlarges Life Technologies' capabilities and product range in the expanding biopharmaceutical research and manufacturing market.

“Our acquisition of BAC, BV positions Life Technologies as a leading provider of end-to-end solutions that are widely utilized in the bioprocess workflow,” said Tony Hunt, head of bioproduction at Life Technologies. “Combining BAC’s current portfolio and pipeline with our preexisting portfolio expands Life’s product offering and enables us to compete more fully across the protein purification market. We intend to immediately integrate the portfolios and leverage the Life commercial platform to drive accelerated growth in this market.”

Life Technologies’ Gibco brand is a market leader in cell-culture media, and the company more recently incorporated its POROS chromatography resins for purification of therapeutics into the bioproduction product range. Bioprocessing involves the analytic and production testing of biologically based therapeutics, which are processed in cultured cells or microorganisms, and include vaccines, drugs, biosimilars, and gene and cell therapies.

The acquisition increases Life Technologies’s existing product range by adding BAC’s series of novel and proprietary affinity ligands to the company’s POROS resins. Affinity ligands are molecules capable of binding with very high affinity to specific proteins, and are typically attached to chromatography resins in a production-scale, biopurification process.

Life Technologies customers will benefit from a streamlined approach to protein purification with personalized end-to-end solutions. In addition to Gibco culture media, POROS resins, and the BAC affinity ligand portfolio for protein purification, Life Technologies also provides Applied Biosystems (Foster City, CA, USA) SEQ rapid molecular kits for impurity and containment testing of biotherapeutic products.

“We are looking forward to developing and providing unique, enabling products from our combined portfolios and capabilities to our purification customers,” said Laurens Sierkstra, PhD, chief executive officer of BAC. Current BAC facilities, a manufacturing site in Naarden and R&D facility in Leiden, Netherlands, will remain in operation. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Life Technologies is a global biotechnology company with customers in more than 160 countries. The company’s portfolio covers the biologic range, with more than 50,000 products for translational research, agricultural biotechnology, molecular medicine, and diagnostics, stem cell-based therapies, forensics, food safety, and animal health. The company employs about 10,400 people and holds more than 4,000 patents and exclusive licenses. Life Technologies had sales of USD 3.7 billion in 2011.

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