PerkinElmer acquires Geospiza, recognizes importance of genomic information

Xconomy's Luke Timmerman explains why life science toolmaking giant PerkinElmer decided to acquire Seattle bioinformatics business Geospiza, despite the fact that the acquisition will have "minimal impact" on PerkinElmer's short term finances, in the words of PerkinElmer CEO Rob Friel. It's because there is a recognition, at last, among the big biotech players that data crunching is going to be a bigger and bigger part of their business.

"Genomic information is becoming increasingly important in understanding and treating disease," PerkinElmer's Richard Begley said in a statement. "Making sense of the unprecedented volumes of data generated by next generation sequencing and other biological measurements is critical to improve the disease diagnosis process and drug discovery."

Timmerman writes that it's been a long struggle for Geospiza, which has fought to gain traction since its founding in 1997, but that it's "been one of the small and persistent voices in the market that has insisted that biologists need better software to manage genomic information." After more than a decade of competition with "old-school Excel spreadsheets" and home-brew software developed as needed by individual labs, the acquisition from PerkinElmer appears to be an acknowledgment that Geospiza's hard work and vision might yet pay off.

- read the story in Xconomy