Congrats to Neuronascent on Landing DBED Funding

A quick shout out to our friends at Neuronascent for landing $50,000 in DBED funding, according to an article today in the Baltimore Business Journal

I have been working with them on a number of projects using my amniotic stem cells.  Using their Cellomics ArrayScan machine, they can probe live cultures for hundreds of different markers and take some pretty nice pictures, too.

And I know  this article says that they are a Carrol County company, but their lab in in Frederick County, so they deserve a post here.

Invitrogen Buys CellzDirect for $57 MM

Last week, news broke that Invitrogen had acquired CellzDirect for $57 Million.

I was intrigued because in my last position at Celsis/In Vitro Technologies (IVT) , CellzDirect was our biggest competitor, I worked 14 years for LTI (which became Invitrogen) and Invitrogen remains one of the largest, if not the largest, biotech employer in the County.

IVT makes primary human hepatocytes.   We sold them to the largest drug companies around the globe for screening drug compound candidates for toxicity.  Although CellzDirect was our #1 competitor, a close #2 competitor was Cambrex/Lonza.

Even though CellzDirect is in North Carolina, I wonder what impact having a major player like Invitrogen enter the ring is going to have on both of these companies? Time will tell.