PerkinElmer Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

FDA’s Woodcock reassures about COVID-19 tests, vaccines under Omicron

Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock

Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock thinks many COVID-19 tests will continue to work with the new Omicron variant — with information coming soon on vaccine efficacy.

In a statement posted yesterday, Woodcock said she thought the agency is well-positioned to work with companies to address the potential impact of viral mutations on COVID-19 tests, therapeutics, and vaccines.

“Getting vaccinated or receiving a booster with one of the currently available vaccines is the best thing that you can do right now (in addition to standard precautions like wearing a mask) to help protect yourself, your family and friends,” Woodcock said.

Discovered in late November in South Africa, the Omicron variant has more than 30 changes to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The variant has enough mutations to raise concerns worldwide, even though it is still un…

COVID-19 test makers say their products also detect Omnicron

[Image from Pixabay]

Abbott, BD, Hologic, PerkinElmer and Thermo Fisher are reassuring the public that their COVID-19 tests detect the Omnicron variant.

Discovered last week in South Africa, the new variant has enough mutations that it has raised concerns worldwide — even though it is still unknown for sure whether the mutations cause greater transmissibility or vaccine evasion. The United States is among the countries restricting travel from southern Africa for the time being, and the CDC is advising all adults to get a booster shot.

Pfizer and Moderna say they’ll create new versions of their vaccines if needed.

Abbott said in a statement on November 27: “We have already conducted an assessment of the Omicron variant, and we’re confident our rapid and PCR tests can detect the virus. While the Omicron variant contains mutations to the spike protein, Abbott’s rapid and molec…

PerkinElmer launches new cloud-based platform for managing workflows

PerkinElmer (NYSE:PKI) announced today that it launched its PKeye workflow monitor for remotely managing and monitoring workflows.

Waltham, Massachusetts–based PerkinElmer’s cloud-based PKeye workflow monitor enables laboratory personnel to remotely handle PerkinElmer instruments and workflows in real-time through 24/7 access and visibility into laboratory operations.

Get the full story at our sister site, MassDevice.

Medtech M&A: The industry’s biggest mergers and acquisitions of 2021

[Image from Jp Valery on Unsplash]

Across 2021, medtech has seen a wide range of mergers and acquisitions covering several areas of devices, pharmaceuticals and more.

Some have gone off without a hitch, while others fell into serious scrutiny as mouthwatering financial figures were revealed and major technologies were acquired.

Here are the 10 biggest mergers and acquisitions in medtech in 2021:

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PerkinElmer launches cloud-based research suite for pharmaceutical customers

PerkinElmer (NYSE:PKI) announced today that it launched the Signals Research suite for both pharmaceutical and industrial customers.

Waltham, Massachusetts-based PerkinElmer’s full cloud-based Signals Research suite, deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a secure informatics platform with integrated, end-to-end scientific data and workflow management for pharmaceutical and industrial customers.

PerkinElmer designed the platform to help drive more informed and accelerated decision making around drug, compound and formulation candidates through PerkinElmer’s informatics technologies, according to a news release. Multi-discipline R&D teams can unify critical experiment and testing data, better configure and control workflows and more effectively and efficiently manage critical scientific results, the company said.

The platform combines PerkinElmer Informatics’ Signals Notebook electronic lab notebook with the Signals VitroVivo d…

PerkinElmer announces Street-beating Q2, plans to acquire BioLegend for $5.3B

PerkinElmer (NYSE:PKI) today posted Street-beating second-quarter revenues and announced the $5.3 billion acquisition of BioLegend.

The Waltham, Mass.-based company posted profits of $245.9 million, or $2.19 per share, on sales of $1.2 billion for the three months ended July 4, 2021, for a 79.3% bottom-line gain on sales growth of 51.3%.

Get the full story at our sister site, MassDevice.

PerkinElmer launches its first cell painting kit

PerkinElmer (NYSE:PKI) announced today that it launched the first cell painting kit as part of its PhenoVue cellular imaging reagent portfolio.

Waltham, Mass.-based PerkinElmer’s new range of reagents utilizes the company’s expertise in cellular imaging and high-content screening while working with its microplates, automation offerings and software to allow researchers to better understand diseases and develop more pinpointed therapies and drugs for treating them, according to a news release.

PhenoVue’s reagents include fluorescent organelle staining probes and dye-labeled secondary antibodies to reduce customers’ assay development time with high-content screening applications.

The system combines cell and computational biology to achieve cell painting, studying the effects of perturbagens (including chemical compounds, drugs or genes) on the behavior of cells. Cells are “painted” in the process of labeling cellular co…

PerkinElmer launches open data site for COVID-19 treatment research

PerkinElmer recently launched an online, open-access COVID-19 data dashboard for the global scientific community.

The dashboards are powered by the company’s data analytics and data visualization solutions to help researchers quickly and easily leverage large amounts of drug compounds and clinical trial data.

The COVID-19 dashboards are supported by PerkinsElmer’s Signals Lead Discovery and the TIBCO Spotfire advanced analytics platform with built-in artificial intelligence functionality. They offer an easy to use solution for searching, aggregating and visualizing complex, scientific data.

Using the platform, scientists can narrow down the 1.6 million compounds that are publicly available by querying a curated chemical substance dataset and related activity data provided by a division of the American Chemical Society known as CAS.

CAS COVID-19 Antiviral Candidate Compound data is an open source Data collection Assembled by scientists …

PerkinElmer expects strong Q2 results from COVID-19 testing

PerkinElmer (NYSE:PKI) said today that it anticipates sales growth of approximately 12% for the second quarter, fueled by demand for COVID-19 tests and related products.

The Waltham, Mass.-based diagnostic and scientific instrument company said demand for its RT-PCR and serology tests, RNA extraction systems and kits and automated liquid handling instrumentation was particularly robust. COVID-19 related solutions contributed approximately $190 million of revenue in the quarter ended July 5, 2020, the company noted.

All is not sunny for PerkinElmer, however. A May report by Reuters said the company is under federal scrutiny for alleged involvement in a scam to bill Medicare for tens of thousands of unnecessary genetic cancer tests. PerkinElmer said at the time that it was unaware of such an investigation.

Shares in PKI were up 4% this morning to $105.52 on the news.

PerkinElmer will release its second quarter 2020 financial results on Tuesday, July…