Abbott shells out $215M for Isis unit

Abbott Laboratories has forged a deal to buy a unit of Isis Pharmaceuticals for $175 million--on top of a $40 million investment it made earlier this year. With its acquisition of Ibis Biosciences Abbott gets the Ibis T5000, a device used in R&D to identify infectious agents. Isis also stands to earn additional payments based on future sales of its molecular diagnostics systems.

"We have already presented development plans for the next-generation instrument that will facilitate our rapid growth into clinical diagnostics," said Michael Treble, president of Ibis. "This year we have made substantial progress by advancing our broad pathogen detection and characterization capabilities and establishing a foundation for our commercial clinical diagnostic products."

"The broad applicability of Ibis' technology has been demonstrated in biodefense applications, microbial forensics and infectious disease detection and surveillance, and we believe that it has the potential to be a powerful tool in the detection and surveillance of infectious diseases in the hospital and clinical settings," added Stafford O'Kelly, vice president, molecular diagnostics, Abbott.

The T5000 can be used to identify "virtually all bacteria, viruses and fungi, and can provide information about drug resistance, virulence and strain type of these pathogens."

- check out the release [1]
- read the AP report [2]

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