Invitrogen is one of several brands under the Thermo Fisher Scientific
corporation. The product line includes various subbrands of biotechnology
products, such as machines and consumables for polymerase chain
reaction, reverse transcription, cloning, culturing, stem cell
production, cell therapy, regenerative medicine, immunotherapy, transfection,
DNA/RNA purification, and diagnostic tests.
The predecessor corporation was Invitrogen Corporation, headquartered in
Carlsbad, California. In 2008, a merger between Applied Biosystems and
Invitrogen was finalized, creating Life Technologies. The latter was acquired by
Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2014. History
= Founding = Invitrogen was founded in 1987 by Lyle
Turner, Joe Fernandez, and William McConnell and was incorporated in 1989.
The company initially found success with its kits for molecular cloning—notably,
The Librarian, a kit for making cDNA libraries, and the FastTrack Kit for
mRNA isolation from biological samples. William McConnell left the company in
1989. In 1999, the company, which had reached
sales of $33 million the prior year, went public, with a plan of
consolidating biotechnology research boutique suppliers. The company had
become quite successful at licensing technologies into its niche market, of
cloning and expression, but determined that many niche leaders were not
interested in licensing, and M&A needed to be added to the companies set of
tools for growth. = Mergers and acquisitions =
Invitrogen acquired NOVEX, a leader in cloned protein characterization, within
60 days of going public. In December 1999, it purchased Research Genetics,
Inc., a leader in genomics and synthetic DNA chemistry, becoming a $100 million
company within a year of its IPO. The business scope expanded
significantly when it acquired the rival biotechnology and cell culture company
Life Technologies/GIBCO in 2000. Since then, the company has continued to add
technologies through a series of mergers and acquisitions, which have broadened
its customer base and strengthened its intellectual property portfolio. Among
these, established companies such as Ethrog Biotechnology, Molecular Probes,
Dynal, Panvera, InforMax, BioSource, CellzDirect and Zymed and Caltag
Laboratories have been brought under the Invitrogen brand.
In 2008, Invitrogen virtually doubled its size with the purchase of biotech
instrumentation company Applied Biosystems, maker of DNA sequencing and
PCR machines and reagents. The company then renamed the overall organization as
Life Technologies. The Invitrogen brand and most of the brands acquired still
exist on product packaging, although the overall company is called Life
Technologies. In summer 2010, the company acquired the computer chip DNA
sequencing company Ion Torrent Systems. Through this history of acquisitions and
continued product research and development, Invitrogen / Life
Technologies had over 50,000 products. Portfolio
= Key products and technologies = Utilizing this business strategy,
Invitrogen represented a large number of products: Dynabeads magnetic separation
technology, GIBCO cell culture media and reagents, SuperScript reverse
transcriptase, Platinum Taq polymerase, TOPO cloning and expression products,
Novex protein electrophoresis products, and numerous fluorescent reagents such
as Qdot nanocrystals and Alexa Fluor and SYBR dyes. Invitrogen currently offers
more than 25,000 products and services to support research in cellular
analysis, genomics, proteomics, and drug discovery, and sought to leverage their
extensive technology portfolio to address research problems in developing
fields, including biodefense and environmental diagnostics,
bioinformatics, epigenetics, and stem cell research.
= Innovation and impact = Under a contract from the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency, the company developed a prototype hand-held pathogen detection
system for the detection of multiple toxins such as ricin, staphylococcal
enterotoxin, and botulinum toxin, as well as bacteria that cause anthrax,
plague, and other diseases, in a single sample. Invitrogen was also awarded a
contract to provide kits for detecting possible E. coli O157 contamination in
food at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China. The monitoring program,
based on World Health Organization food standards, is conducted by the Beijing
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Olympic Food Safety
program. Similarly, the company's PathAlert technology was selected to
monitor Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the plague, at the Torino
Winter Games in 2006. Their Qubit platform for RNA, DNA, and protein
quantitation was awarded an R&D 100 Award as being a "Top 100
Technologically Significant New Product" by R&D Magazine.
Invitrogen developed and introduced stem cell products. Among more than 1,200
products for stem cell research, the company offered an engineered stem cell
line and various STEMPRO products for manual passaging of human embryonic stem
cells, to promote hESC growth and expansion, and to allow scientists to
ascertain hESC pluripotency. = Customer resources =
Now in its tenth edition, the Molecular Probes Handbook is offered as a
reference for fluorescence detection technology and its many applications.
References External links