Nexus Biosystems, a life sciences tools company located 20 miles north of San Diego in Poway, says it’s acquiring another tools company in the area, Aurora Biotechnologies. The price wasn’t disclosed.

Both privately held companies develop technologies for the storage and management of biological samples used to study genetic traits and human disease, among other things. Their customers include pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agrichemical companies, and research institutions. Nexus CEO John Lillig says the acquisition broadens the company’s product offerings.

“As we head into 2010 with Aurora technologies, we are very excited about the opportunity to expand our product reach beyond automated sample management into high throughput biochemical, cell-based and genomic screening applications,” Lillig says in a statement.

Aurora, which is located near San Diego in Carlsbad, CA, traces its roots to Aurora Biosciences, a tools company that was acquired by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, MA. Aurora Biotechnologies was founded to commercialize the instrumentation of Aurora Biosciences. Dr. Roger Tsien, of UC San Diego and the 2008 Nobel laureate in chemistry, was a scientific co-founder of Aurora Biosciences and is a co-inventor of several of Aurora Biotechnologies patents, according to the latter company.

Nexus was founded in 2005 and has a subsidiary in Germany. The company’s financial backers include Telegraph Hill Partners, a private equity firm in San Francisco.

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Helixis, a Carlsbad, CA, biomedical diagnostics startup founded in 2007, has raised $5.5 million in a secondary round that aims to total $6.5 million in venture funding, according to a report in PE Hub. The company says it was created to make advanced molecular diagnostic products more accessible for critical medical and scientific use. Domain Associates, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Okapi Venture Capital led initial venture funding of $10 million. The founders include Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore, a Caltech biology professor, and Alex Scherer, a Caltech professor of electrical engineering, applied physics, and physics.

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Nexus Biosystems, a four-year-old biotech tools maker in Poway, CA, has raised $5 million in venture funding from Telegraph Hill Partners, a private equity firm based in San Francisco, according to a regulatory filing. Nexus CEO John Lillig, who declined to comment on the filing, told me the company specializes in making automated sample storage and retrieval systems capable of holding millions of compounds. In a statement, Nexus says the funding will be used to accelerate the commericalization of several new products, including a family of machines that store samples at minus-80 degrees Celsius.

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