As announced in late July, Invitrogen said the the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act had expired. The company added that it is now engaging with the European Commission.

The deal is being financed in part by a $2.65 billion bank facility fully underwritten by Bank of America, UBS and Morgan Stanley. Invitrogen has said the syndication was expected to be completed by the end of September.

Applied Biosystems, headquartered in Foster City, CA, sells big-ticket systems for laboratory research, such as gene-sequencing machines. Invitrogen, based in Carlsbad, CA, supplies the reagents used by many of those systems.

The merged company would generate $3.5 billion in combined sales and offer a wide variety of products in areas such as genetic analysis, proteomics, cell biology and cell systems.

SOURCE: Reuters