Formulatrix, Inc. and Bruker AXS Announce Joint Marketing Partnership for High Throughput Crystallization Systems
Formulatrix Inc and Bruker AXS announced that they have entered into a joint marketing agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, the Bruker/Discovery Partners International (DPI) Crystal Farm(TM) integrated incubation and imaging system becomes available as an imager in Formulatrix’s Rock Maker(TM) software.
The Crystal Farm is the first integrated incubation and imaging system for protein crystallization to be offered to the crystallography community. By providing high throughput protein crystallization automation, the Crystal Farm is accelerating structure based drug design. Combining a 400 plate capacity, environmentally controlled incubator and DPI’s patent pending “cool flash” imaging technology, the DPI Crystal Farm offers unprecedented advancements in crystal screening automation.
Rock Maker is a robust, scalable, multiuser software solution that automates and tracks the entire protein crystallization process, including experiment design, liquid dispensing, plate storage and retrieval, and imaging. Rock Maker is designed to be platform independent and can be integrated with virtually any liquid handler, plate storage and retrieval and imaging system.
“We are very pleased to be working with Formulatrix,” says Dr. Daniel Frankel, Product Manager for life sciences business development. “Integration of the Crystal Farm with the Rock Maker software is a major step forward in completely automating the protein crystallization experiment. This partnership will facilitate crystal farm users to seamlessly integrate liquid handling instrumentation with their imaging and incubation.”
“By controlling both the liquid handling robotics and the incubation and optical scanning in the Crystal Farm, the Rock Maker software ‘closes the loop’ to allow crystallization conditions to be rapidly scanned and then optimized,” says Dr. Roger Durst, Chief Technology Officer for Bruker AXS. “Together with the Bruker Proteum x-ray crystallography system, this constitutes a powerful yet affordable high-throughput “structure factory.”
Jeremy Stevenson, CEO of Formulatrix, stated: ” We are very happy to have a strong working partnership with Bruker, integrating Rock Maker with Crystal Farm. This integration provides Rock Maker customers with a high end plate storage and retrieval system.”
ABOUT FORMULATRIX
Formulatrix specializes in providing technology that automates the protein crystallization process, a key part of structure based drug discovery. Since our inception, we have established ourselves as one of the major solution providers for automated protein crystallization. Our flagship product, Rock Maker, has been deployed to multiple sites at major Pharmaceutical and Biotech companies. For further information, please visit www.formulatrix.com
ABOUT BRUKER AXS
Bruker AXS Inc is a leading company providing advanced protein crystallographic incubation & imaging systems, integrated X-ray systems and complete solutions for molecular and elemental analysis by X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence. Both techniques are non-destructive and provide essential information about the 3-dimensional structure of chemical and biological molecules as well as structural parameters and elemental composition information of any type of solid or liquid materials. Our products, which have particular application in the life science and materials science fields, provide our customers with the ability to determine the structure of specific molecules, such as proteins, and to characterize and determine the composition and physical properties of materials. Our integrated systems address multiple existing and emerging markets, including: drug discovery and development, structural proteomics, advanced materials research, and industrial process control.
Our customers include biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, semiconductor companies, raw material manufacturers, chemical companies, academic institutions and other businesses involved in materials analysis. For more information, please visit www.bruker-axs.com
CAUTIONARY STATEMENT
Any statements contained in this press release that do not describe historical facts may constitute forward-looking statements as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on current expectations, but are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. The factors that could cause actual future results to differ materially from current expectations include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties relating to the Company’s reorganization strategies, integration risks, failure of conditions, technological approaches, product development, market acceptance, cost and pricing of the Company’s products, changes in governmental regulations, capital spending and government funding policies, FDA and other regulatory approvals to the extent applicable, competition, the intellectual property of others, patent protection and litigation. These and other factors are identified and described in more detail more detail in the Bruker BioSciences Corporation filings with the SEC, including, without limitation, our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2003, our most recent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and our current reports on Form 8-K. We disclaim any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
