To: INOVA Customers and Collaborators
From: Walter L. Binder, Ph.D.
Senior V.P. of R&D and Chief Technology Officer
INOVA Diagnostics, Inc.
Subject: Recent Acquisition of INOVA by the Werfen Group
As many of you have already heard, INOVA is now part of the Werfen Group, a family of companies that includes Instrumentation Laboratory (IL), BioKit and Bolton Medical. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts on this exciting development.
First of all, INOVA was acquired because of a 20-year history of successful development and manufacturing of high quality and innovative test kits for aiding in diagnosis of autoimmune diseases. The INOVA name, our product trademarks, our people and our location in sunny San Diego will not change. Also, unchanged will be the excellent relationships we enjoy with customers and collaborators from all over the world. We look forward to an even higher level of customer service in certain markets outside of the US due to the additional marketing and sales muscle provided by select Werfen Group partners.
All of us in the R&D department are particularly pleased with the prospect of working within the Werfen Group as we are being told to “Keep doing what you have been doing only do it faster and even better”. Werfen has a history of aggressive investment in R&D and we are already seeing the benefits of this.
In addition to a healthier R&D budget we are already seeing the benefits of sharing knowledge, resources and technology with some of our sister companies – especially IL and Biokit. We have always had a rich new product pipeline at INOVA. We have had 3 new product approvals in the first 6 weeks of '08 alone and another is pending. I am confident that we will continue with our historically rapid pace of innovation and would like to express my thanks to all of the great customers and scientific collaborators that have contributed to our success over the years. The INOVA/Werfen synergy will result in some truly exciting and powerful new tools for diagnosis and management of autoimmune diseases and I personally am excited to be a part of this.
Best regards,
Wally
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