Aclara Biosciences was founded in 1995 as
Soane BioSciences, Inc. in
Delaware, and was renamed Aclara Biosciences, Inc. in 1998. The company subsequently relocated its headquarters to
Mountain View,
California, and its
initial public offering of 9 million shares took place on the NASDAQ
stock exchange in March 2000. Also in 2000, Aclara was sued by
Caliper Technologies for allegedly misappropriating Caliper's
trade secrets in regard to the latter company's microfluidics technology. This suit represented one of several legal battles between the two companies, each of which accused the other of
infringing on their patents. On October 26, 2000, a jury in
California found Aclara guilty of misappropriating trade secrets and awarded
Caliper $52,568,000. In 2004, it was reported that Aclara would be purchased by
Virologic for $180 million in stock, the equivalent of $4.78 per share. In December 2004, Virologic completed its acquisition of Aclara for $160 million in stock; each of Aclara's shareholders received 1.7 shares of Virologic stock for each share of Aclara stock they had owned. ==Products==