OriGene Technologies buys Marligen Biosciences

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Vandana Sinha

OriGene Technologies Inc. has acquired Marligen Biosciences Inc. for an undisclosed amount of cash.

Rockville-based OriGene, a longtime customer of Marligen, said it was interested in owning the smaller, Ijamsville-based company’s product line of purification, labeling, gene expression analysis, genotyping and other high-tech kits, tools that help scientists unearth complex biological information about genes and proteins.

OriGene sells gene cloning and gene expression profiling tools to the same sorts of academic, government, biotech adn pharmaceutical researchers that Marligen has long tapped.

The two are private companies, and haven’t disclosed their combined customer counts or revenue, but OriGene has been on a growth path of late. The company recently moved into larger headquarters on Medical Center Drive and, in February, raised $6.5 million in private equity financing to help it acquire privately held Shenzhen P&A Biotech, a manufacturer of monoclonal antibodies in China.

OriGene officials said a majority of the single-digit number of employees at Marligen will be transitioned to the larger company, and they are still determining long-term plans for the Ijamsville office and lab space.

Marligen CEO Sherry Challberg, who founded the company in 2001 after working at Life Technologies Inc., then Digene Corp., then Invitrogen Corp., will not join OriGene.

The two companies have yet another connection in common, however. Wei-Wu He, OriGene’s founder and president, has also been a general partner in Emerging Technology Partners LLC, an early-stage venture firm that had invested in both Marligen and another Rockville company that Marligen had acquired in 2002 called Clairus Technologies.

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