Wikipedia
Bio-Techne Corporation is a holding company for biotechnology and clinical diagnostic brands. It was founded in 1976 as Techne Corporation and changed its name to Bio-Techne in 2014. The company's brands include flagship R&D Systems (Research and Diagnostic Systems Inc.), Boston Biochem, Tocris Bioscience, BiosPacific and Bionostics. The company's products are used in both clinical and research contexts. The company was co-founded as a "hematology controls developer" by Dr. Roger C. Lucas, who presently serves as its Chief Scientific Advisor.
Bio-Techne is listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol TECH. Writing for Forbes from an investor's perspective, John Reese praised the management team saying it "...appears to be doing a solid job...", a sentiment echoed by Philip van Doorn, writing for Dow Jones MarketWatch. Interviewing investor Edward B. White for the New York Times, Carole Gould noted that White thought the chief executive, Thomas Oland, was a "deeply committed scientist."
Beginning in 2013, the company's chief executive officer was Chuck Kummeth, who had previously been employed by Thermo Fisher Scientific.
In 2014, the same year it underwent a reorganization and changed its name, the company acquired two companies as part of "an aggressive expansion program" and as "part of a long-term strategy to transform [itself] from a reagent supplier to an applied-markets solution provider." Bio-Techne and the Chinese company PrimeGene (Shanghai PrimeGene Bio-Tech) shared customers and sold complementary products; acquisition of PrimeGene, which was anticipated to have completed by the end of 2014, was a strategic move to provide better integrated product offerings to existing customers and provide for reduced cost of manufacturing for "commodity" products. At the same time, Bio-Techne invested in, with plans to eventually acquire, the American equipment maker CyVek with the intention of adapting CyPlex immunoassay technology toward development of a comprehensive platform for use of Bio-Techne products.