Good news for shareholders of Carlsbad, CA-based Isis Pharmaceuticals. Abbott Laboratories, the diversified health products giant, is exercising its right to acquire Isis’ diagnostics spinoff, Ibis Biosciences, for a total of $215 million plus some future payments tied to sales of the instruments.

Abbott Park, IL-based Abbott (NYSE: ABT) will pay Isis shareholders $175 million now, to buy Isis’ 80 percent ownership stake in Ibis Biosciences, the companies said this morning in a joint statement. The deal is expected to close in January, once it gets clearance from federal regulators. Shares of Isis (NASDAQ: ISIS) climbed modestly after the announcement.

This was really not a surprise to me, since I profiled Ibis shortly after we launched Xconomy’s San Diego bureau in October. Abbott made a down payment on Ibis earlier in the year, because of its interest in the Ibis’ T5000 machine, which is used for research that can identify something new and unfamiliar like a SARS virus. The appeal with the Ibis machine is that when people walk into the hospital with nasty flu-like symptoms, and doctors don’t know where the bug came from, the custom is to take a fluid sample and grow it in a lab dish for a day or two to get enough material to find out what it is. Ibis says its tool can give a more definite answer within eight to 16 hours, by looking at the bug’s DNA.

“The broad applicability of Ibis’ technology has been demonstrated in biodefense applications, microbial forensics and infectious disease detection and surveillance, and we believe that it has the potential to be a powerful tool in the detection and surveillance of infectious diseases in the hospital and clinical settings,” said Stafford O’Kelly, Abbott’s vice president of molecular diagnostics, in a statement.

Isis shares climbed 4 percent to $12.53 at 9:43 am Eastern time.

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Seattle researchers snapped up the lion’s share of a massive round of grants announced today by the National Institutes of Health. The Institute for Systems Biology, the University of Washington, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA—along with a group at Stanford University—have been awarded five-year grants totaling $68.7 million to study dangerous viral pathogens like bird flu, SARS, and tuberculosis.

The Institute for Systems Biology’s piece is worth $14 million over the next five years to study dangerous strains of flu, like H5N1 or so-called bird flu, says ISB’s Alan Aderem, the lead investigator on the grant. The UW’s Michael Katze will study a separate project on flu and SARS, while the PNNL’s Joshua Adkins will lead a group studing bacterial troublemakers like salmonella and yersinia pestis, according to a statement from the NIH.

The main thrust of ISB’s research is to learn more about components of the immune system, the flu virus, and how the two interact with each other, Aderem says. The ultimate goal is to identify new targets on cells for drugs and vaccines. Seasonal flu kills 40,000 people a year in the U.S. and costs the economy an estimated $80 billion a year, so the researchers shouldn’t have too much trouble explaining to the public why this matters. The results will be made available in public databases, the sort of thing any pharmaceutical or biotech company could use as a foundation to develop new products.

The immune system is hugely complex, so I wondered why this is the right time to take on such an ambitious project. The ISB, in its eight-year history, has been working to this point by first studying systems biology of microorganisms like yeast, then mice, and is now ready to step up to studying humans, Aderem says. “We have the computational tools to understand this mountain of data that you get from high-throughput techniques, so we’re ready to take on a big problem like this,” Aderem says.

The ISB plans to hire another eight to 10 people, mostly senior scientists, adding to its staff of 230, Aderem says. It will also divvy out some of its grant work to researchers at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, University of California, San Diego, and Vanderbilt University, he says.

The researchers in Memphis, led by Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty, will expose mice to H5N1 flu in a more secure facility than the one ISB has, Aderem says. The key fluids and tissues of interest, which need to be examined to see how their immune systems respond, will be shipped to ISB, where high-powered computers will analyze and map out the immune response, Aderem says.

“These new projects promise to deepen our fundamental understanding of the complex molecular processes of microbes and their interactions with the host, including how molecular-level events lead to the initiation and progression of disease,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a statement. “We anticipate that these projects will generate new insights that will help us develop new tools to prevent, diagnose and treat important infectious diseases.”

None of the research teams in the Northwest collaborated on their grant proposals, and didn’t have any idea whom they were competing with for the grants, Aderem says. “These projects are completely independent of one another,” Aderem says. “It really is interesting that three of the four of them come from the Pacific Northwest.”

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