PE Biosystems

I'll verify this company's profile with web searches.

PE Biosystems — formally the PE Biosystems Group of PE Corporation (and briefly, before 1998, the PE Applied Biosystems division of Perkin-Elmer) — was the life-sciences instrument business headquartered in Foster City, California. Its roots trace to Applied Biosystems, Inc., founded in 1981 by Sam Eletr and Andre Marion, which Perkin-Elmer acquired in 1993. The "PE Biosystems" name was adopted in 1998 when Perkin-Elmer consolidated Applied Biosystems with PerSeptive Biosystems, Tropix and PE Informatics. In 2000 the parent became Applera Corporation and the group reverted to the Applied Biosystems name (NYSE: ABI). It reported roughly US$1.4 billion in net revenues and about 5,000 employees around the 2000 name change. The name no longer exists as a standalone company: Applied Biosystems merged with Invitrogen in 2008 to form Life Technologies, which Thermo Fisher Scientific acquired in 2014; "Applied Biosystems" survives as a Thermo Fisher brand.

Products / operations. This was a genuine operating company, not an assertion vehicle. It developed and sold instrument-based systems, reagents, software and contract services for life-science research — automated DNA sequencers (notably the ABI PRISM 3700 used in the Human Genome Project), DNA and peptide synthesizers, PCR reagents and thermal cyclers, mass-spectrometry and protein-analysis tools, and related consumables and informatics. It licensed foundational nucleic-acid chemistry, including Caltech-linked patents.

Patent-litigation posture. The data show one tracked case, as plaintiff and none as defendant — consistent with an operating company enforcing chemistry patents it exclusively licensed, not an NPE. PE Biosystems (with Competitive Technologies, Inc.) sued Affymetrix, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware on July 5, 2000, asserting five patents (U.S. 4,458,066; 4,500,707; 5,132,418; 5,153,319; 4,973,679) covering oligonucleotide synthesis processes and reagents that Affymetrix bought from licensed vendors.

Context. The Delaware court dismissed the complaint in September 2001 for lack of standing (PE Corporation held no proprietary interest; the exclusive licensee was a different PE entity), and Affymetrix's parallel declaratory-judgment action in the Southern District of New York proceeded. Affymetrix subsequently won summary judgment that the last-to-expire asserted patent had expired. Reporting on the dispute is limited to that period.