Briefs: New MD for St John’s Innovation Centre; Amino completes £1.4m takeover of AssetHouse
St John’s Innovation Centre has appointed David Gill (pictured) to succeed Walter Herriot OBE as managing director from December. Mr Gill qualified as a barrister before working in both investment and commercial banking, most recently as Head of the Innovation & Technology Unit for HSBC, the largest UK-based international bank.
Since 2005 has been a partner in ET Capital, a specialist early-stage venture capital fund based in Cambridge.
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Brady plc (BRY.L), supplier of trading and risk management solutions for metals and commodities, launched Opval.NET, the enhanced version of its front office trading and risk management solution for commodity options pricing and risk management. New added Microsoft .NET capability delivers faster and more efficient system performance.
Opval.NET was developed by Brady’s in-house R&D team after close collaboration with clients. The upgrade offers a number of benefits including integration with a range of third party systems in trading rooms. In addition to providing access to Microsoft's latest technologies such as AJAX and Web 2.0, new features in Opval.NET include support for MS SQL-Server 2005, improved data sharing and increased build integrity, stability and performance.
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Psynova Neurotech, developing novel biomarkers to aid the diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric illnesses, said it is partnering with Rules-Based Medicine Inc, the leading multiplexed biomarker testing laboratory, to co-develop and commercialise a blood test for the diagnosis of schizophrenia.
The current diagnosis of schizophrenia is highly subjective and time-consuming, due to the lack of objective biological tests specific for the disease. The resulting delay and uncertainty in diagnosis leads to delayed treatment, and, in turn, extended suffering and hardship for patients and their families. In the few studies where early treatment has been implemented in high risk patient groups, poor outcomes were substantially reduced, as were the duration of untreated illness, inpatient days, and the time to remission. Therefore, a test that provides earlier and more accurate diagnosis of the disease would deliver not only improved patient outcomes but also greatly reduce the overall costs of schizophrenia to health services and society.
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Stem Cell Sciences plc (STEM.L), provider of stem cells and associated technologies for drug discovery, announced the licensing of certain rights to green fluorescent protein (GFP) technology from Prolume Ltd (Arizona, USA). SCS will incorporate the GFP technology, which acts as a gene expression marker, into its SC Proven research reagents portfolio as well as certain stem cell technologies used in services assays for high-throughput drug screening and toxicity testing. SCS provides physiologically relevant stem cells as well as corresponding reagents and services on an industrial scale to pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners as tools to facilitate drug discovery and testing. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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Amino Technologies plc, the broadband network software and systems group, said it has completed the acquisition of AssetHouse Technologies Ltd.
AssetHouse was acquired for £1.4m on a debt-free basis, payable in cash. The acquisition of AssetHouse, a software business whose principal customer is British Telecommunications plc, will broaden the range of technologies Amino can offer to IPTV service operators of all sizes. The acquisition will also give Amino access to the emerging Online Video Services market (formerly referred to as the 'Internet TV' market).
