Biotech tools company Invitrogen has appointed a team charged with integrating the company's operations with those of Applied Biosystems (AB), another biotech tools company, which Invitrogen acquired last week in a deal valued at a whopping $6.7 billion.

The announcement, made today (June 20) in a press release, marks the first step in the merger between the two companies, which is set to be completed this autumn. The company expects the move to yield a $60 million boost in combined profits by 2009, and $125 million by 2010.

"The leadership teams of both companies have carefully considered the challenges and opportunities associated with bringing these two great companies together, and have launched a highly structured program to drive a seamless and efficient integration," Gregory T. Lucier, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Invitrogen said in the release.

Michael Hunkapiller, who spent 21 years at AB and left the company position of president and general manager in 2004, told The Scientist that the impact of the merger on the life science community "all depends on how the integration goes."

If it can be accomplished smoothly, without disruptions to either company's operations, he said, the merger will have a positive outcome on users of the companies' products. The businesses of the two companies are distinct -- with Invitrogen focusing largely on cell biology and AB on systems and analysis -- "so there's the potential of having more choices for customers," said Hunkapiller, who is now a partner at Alloy Ventures in Palo Alto. (He was also a coinventor of the DNA sequencer and a founder of Celera Genomics.)

"Invitrogen was a really small reagent company not that many years ago," Hunkapiller said, and Lucier has "built the company largely through acquisitions." He noted that the acquisition of AB should not come as a surprise. "There has certainly been an increasing trend for growth by acquisition in the life sciences tools space," he said, including similar recent moves by companies such as Roche, GE Healthcare, and Amersham. Because both Invitrogen and AB were large players in the field, he added, what remains to be seen is "whether or not [the acquisition] will trigger other moves by similar companies in the space."



Correction (June 25): In a previous version of this article, the year 2010 was incorrectly written as 2001. The Scientist regrets the error.