EnCor Biotechnology Inc.

EnCor Biotechnology Incorporated is a company founded in Gainesville, Florida as a spin-off from the University of Florida. It arose as a result of the work of Gerry Shaw, a British scientist and professor in the University. Dr. Shaw previously worked with Dennis Bray in King's College London and Klaus Weber and Mary Osborn in the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. As a result of working with these individuals, Dr. Shaw had realized the value of high quality antibodies as important research reagents. In the Weber and Osborn lab he had also learned how to make both monoclonal antibodies and polyclonal antibodies. When he moved to the University of Florida in 1986 he continued to make antibodies, and shipped them out to friends, colleagues, collaborators and independent researchers. Shipping these reagents got to be a drain both financially and in terms of time commitment, and he began to supply these reagents in bulk to commercial vendors, initially Chemicon, a company located in Temecula, California, which was later bought out by Millipore which was in turn recently purchased by the German company Merck KGaA (known as EMD Chemicals in the USA to distinguish it from the American Merck company). In the following years numerous other companies sold these products, and more and more new reagents were developed. As sales increased over the 1990s it became clear that his research lab could not and should not support such commercial enterprises, and accordingly, Dr. Shaw founded ABC Biologicals Inc. at the end of 1999. At the end of 2002, the company was renamed EnCor Biotechnology Inc. and for the first time occupied rented lab space, in the Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator, a lab dedicated to commercialization of intellectual property generated by the faculty of the University of Florida. The University of Florida is unusually adept at this, as evidenced by the successful marketing of Gatorade, Trusopt and many other products. After 4 years EnCor "graduated" from the Biotechnology Incubator and moved to a facility in Gainesville. The company now has almost 100 products with many more under development and supplies reagents to research labs and other much larger reagent companies such as Abcam, Covance, Invitrogen, Millipore, Novus Biologicals and many others. The major use for these reagents is for research purposes, for immunocytochemistry and western blotting and in some case immunoprecipitation and ELISA. Some have however become useful for diagnostic histopathology and for monitoring the levels of protein biomarkers, of potential clinical utility.

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