Novus Biologicals

Karen Padgett founded Novus Biologicals in 1996 and continues to lead the firm as CEO. Under her leadership, the company grew from a niche antibody supplier into a multinational research reagents company with offices in the United States and Europe. She has maintained private operational control across multiple cycles of life sciences consolidation.

Novus Biologicals develops and validates antibodies in-house, supplemented by partnerships with academic and industry laboratories that contribute validated reagents to its catalog. The firm operates quality control and distribution centers in Colorado and Michigan, with its Utrecht office serving European research institutes and pharmaceutical clients. This hybrid of proprietary manufacturing and curated third-party products allows the catalog to exceed 200,000 SKUs.

Novus Biologicals was acquired by Techne Corporation—now Bio-Techne—in July 2014 for approximately $60 million in cash. It operates as a brand within Bio-Techne's larger diagnostics and research reagents portfolio, alongside sibling brands R&D Systems and Tocris Bioscience. The firm retains its own product catalog and brand identity post-acquisition.

The firm's catalog includes primary antibodies, secondary antibodies, recombinant proteins, ELISA kits, small-molecule inhibitors, and conjugated dyes for immunohistochemistry, western blotting, and flow cytometry. Core research targets include widely studied proteins such as p53, TNF-alpha, and HIF-1 alpha. Products are sold to university core facilities, pharmaceutical R&D divisions, and government biomedical agencies.

Novus Biologicals was entirely founder-funded for the first 18 years of its existence, growing organically without venture capital. Since its 2014 acquisition by Bio-Techne, it operates under the parent company's corporate structure and public-company balance sheet. The firm has not raised funding from institutional limited partners or private equity firms independently.