Research & Commercialization News
IT Enterprises Portfolio Company MOgene, LC, Hosts Successful Open House
MOgene, LC, hosted an open house Thursday, Aug. 26, 2009, to celebrate their company’s expansion and new location at IT Enterprises (ITe), an IT and life sciences incubator owned and operated by UM-St. Louis.
An Agilent- and NuGEN-certified genomics services company founded in 2001, MoGene has occupied space at ITe since April 2009. The company provides services to academic, government and industrial research groups and institutions.
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Shaukat Rangwala, vice president, greeted more than 60 guests at the open house as he stood next to a blown-up St. Louis Business Journal article stating that MOgene is expected to double their revenue in 2009. Rangwala, after one guest jokingly asked him for his autograph, said that he is proud of the company’s progress. “The fact that our customers have confidence in us shows that we are on the right path.” Open house attendees included representatives from Agilent, Monsanto, the Nidus Center, NimbleGen, NuGEN, Pfizer, Roche and Sigma-Aldrich. Also attending was UMSL’s Chancellor Tom George, along with various other UMSL and IT Enterprises faculty and staff. |
Shaukat Rangwala, vice president, MOgene, LCMOgene’s promising future was the theme of the evening. Rangwala said much of the company’s recent success can be attributed to their more than 1,600 square feet of customized lab space and access to the 128-core high performance computing center at ITe. “Moving to IT Enterprises enabled us to offer more services to our customers as we were given the opportunity to customize our lab space to fit our needs and the needs of our customers,” he stated. “We are now able to offer six services instead of one and employ four scientists.”
MOgene has recently added NextGen sequencing services using Roche’s 454 GS FLX and gene expression services using NimbleGen by Roche to the list of cutting-edge services they are able to offer their clients. According to Dr. Ganesh Kishore, CEO of Malaysia Life Sciences Capital Fund and a founder of MOgene, the company’s ability to provide these services has attracted worldwide customers, including one Malaysian company who was the first to take advantage of MOgene’s ability to do 454 sequencing. Kishore added that “It takes an entire community to create a company.” He said facilities like IT Enterprises that support the growth of companies like MOgene deserve a lot of credit.
Nasser Arshadi, Vice Provost for Research at UMSL, said, “MOgene is an excellent example of the kind of company that we want to have in our facility. Eighty percent of growth in this economy comes from small companies like them.”
MOgene: http://www.mogene.com
IT Enterprises: http://www.ITenterprises-STL.org
For more information on IT Enterprises, contact Lindsay Shadwell, Manager, ITe.