Caliper Life Sciences (NASDAQ:CALP) is a life sciences company based in Hopkinton, MA with direct sales, service and application-support operations in countries around the globe. Founded in 1995 Caliper develops innovative and enabling products and services to the life sciences research community, including pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and government and other not-for profit research institutions.
Caliper's integrated systems, consisting of instruments, software and reagents, laboratory automation tools and drug discovery assay services enable researchers to better understand the basis for disease and more effectively discover safe and effective drugs. Caliper's product portfolio includes, microfluidics, lab automation & liquid handling, optical imaging technologies, and drug discovery & drug development outsourcing solutions.
Caliper is a pioneer in microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology which represents a significant advancement in laboratory experimentation, bringing the benefits of miniaturization, integration and automation to numerous research-based industries. Caliper's proprietary microfluidic sipper chips are a high-throughput complement to the planar chips which Caliper manufactures for the Agilent Bioanalyzer 2100. The microfluidic technology forms the basis of Caliper's LabChip EZ reader systems used for drug screening and profiling and the LabChip GX series for molecular biology DNA, RNA and protein analysis.
Through its acquisition of Xenogen Corporation in 2006, Caliper is now a developer of in vivo biophotonic imaging technology, which allows for real-time, non-invasive exploration of genes, proteins, pathogens, and tumor cells in living animals. Caliper offers a complement of patented biophotonic and fluorescent imaging technologies, as well as genetically modified animal programs. Caliper's imaging product lines include a suite of IVIS imaging systems - many measuring both bioluminescence and fluorescence, in vivo imaging reagents, specialized light producing animal models, and genetic modification programs for pharmaceutical and biotechnology research and development. In a recent Japanese study, the IVIS imaging system was used to evaluate the binding affinity and RNA interference (RNAi) of LMWC/siRNA complexes.
Caliper has held a long standing position in laboratory automation starting with the introduction of the world's first lab robotic system, the Zymark Zymate. To date, Caliper has a number of lab automation and liquid handling systems for the life sciences industry. In January 2009, the Zephyr Genomics Workstation was introduced which promises to deliver a benchtop solution for automating routine but critical processes for molecular biology such as nucleic acid purification, reaction setup and normalization.
