Pierce Chemical Co.

Pierce Chemical Company (later Pierce Biotechnology, Inc.) is a Rockford, Illinois-based life-sciences reagents business founded in 1948 by Dr. Alan Pierce, who took over a chlorophyll-extraction firm called Midwest Extraction and renamed it Pierce Chemical in 1950. It is no longer independent: Perstorp AB of Sweden bought the company in 1983; it was spun off in 1999 as Stockholm-listed Perbio Science AB; Fisher Scientific International acquired Perbio in 2003; and after the 2006 Thermo Electron–Fisher merger it became part of Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO). The Rockford operation now serves as the R&D and manufacturing site for Thermo Scientific's "Pierce Protein Biology" product line. Employee counts and revenue for the Pierce unit are not separately disclosed.

Products/operations. Pierce is an operating company, not an NPE. It began as a fine-organic-chemicals producer and was the first commercial manufacturer of ninhydrin for amino-acid analysis. It shifted toward high-purity reagents for biotechnology research, and is best known for the bicinchoninic acid (BCA) protein assay, published by its researcher Paul K. Smith in 1985 and patented in 1989, and for SuperSignal chemiluminescent substrates introduced in 1995. Current Pierce-branded offerings cover protein quantitation assays, sample preparation, protein detection, biotinylation and crosslinking reagents, and antibodies.

Litigation posture. The database shows a single tracked case, with Pierce as defendant and zero as plaintiff — consistent with an operating company that resells third-party research kits rather than a patent enforcer. The suit, Giese v. Pierce Chemical Co., was filed November 17, 1997 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts — not a plaintiff-friendly Texas venue — with Vector Laboratories as co-defendant.

Case context. Plaintiff Roger W. Giese asserted contributory infringement and inducement of U.S. Patent Re. 31,712 and B1 4,478,914 (multi-layer chemical attachment methods used in cell-detection kits). Vector manufactured the Vectastain ABC kits; Pierce purchased and resold them. The court granted the defendants summary judgment on laches in December 1998, and a March 1999 ruling addressed reexamination-related claim-enlargement and validity issues.