Originally dba Soane BioSciences, Inc, around 1998 the firm was renamed Aclara Biosciences. In December 2004 Virologic (an SBIR company) merged with Aclara Biosciences Inc. creating a company that focused on developing and commercializing targeted therapeutics and molecular diagnostics in the areas of cancer and infectious diseases such as HIV. A spin-off of Sloan Technologies, ACLARA Biosciences, Inc. had been an early establsihed bio-tech/ life sciences company focused on developing and commercializing assay chemistry solutions for drug discovery and development, providing critical high-value information about the expression and interaction of genes and proteins within cells. The Company develops, manufactures and supplies these biology assays as part of its eTag Assay System. The system is comprised of reagent kits, software and services that simplify and automate various aspects of drug development, preclinical testing and clinical assessment. The eTag assays require no sample preparation steps, and provide for simultaneous analysis of tens of hundreds of different biological analyses across tens of thousands of samples. This multiplexing capability is critical to the overall performance of eTag assays. eTag assays represent a universal platform for the analysis of genes, proteins and cellular pathways and can be analyzed using existing capillary electrophoresis instrumentation systems.
