Formed in 1987 by Sandy Allan and Alex Sim the company’s first offices were in Madrid, Spain. Over the following three years further offices were opened in Italy, Switzerland and the UK. During the formative years of existence AMS helped launch the successful sales campaigns of Stratagene and Invitrogen providing them with an important foothold from which to develop their global brand expansion.

AMSBIO partnered with Pharmingen and contributed to their development until 1996 when they were sold to Becton Dickenson.

In 1995 AMSBIO raised investment capital from 3i and other private sources to support the expansion of the European network to Germany and Sweden and to launch one of the first real time quantitative PCR platforms.

In 1997 the company restructured resulting in the departure of Sandy Allan. The instrumentation division was closed and subsidiaries in Sweden, Italy and Spain were sold. The development of the ImmunoKontact (IK) brand continued with licensing agreements with Novartis the Basel Institute of Immunology and a number of academic institutes.

Concurrently with the development of IK, AMSBIO partnered with Ambion driving European sales forward 10 fold in only three years. Through a strategic arrangement, the company assisted in the formation of Ambion Europe which eventually would lead to Ambion being sold to Applied Biosystems.

AMSBIO serves the European market from facilities in Switzerland, Germany and the UK. This latter location provides the logistics and distribution services as well as housing a multi lingual marketing and technical staff made up of scientists with many years of experience in cutting edge technology.

In 2003 AMSBIO set up facilities for producing peptides and providing hybridoma and monoclonal services. Initially called ABE and based in Switzerland these facilities have expanded to include locations in Southern California and Oxfordshire. Custom services include monoclonal antibody production, custom protein expression and polyclonal antibody services. In 2010 AMSBIO added stable cell line production and lentivirus technology for shRNA and overexpression needs.

Ambitious companies serving the global research science market need state of the art solutions to be able to generate success and help establish a critical mass. The current amsbio portfolio is a testimony to this. Specializing in Genomics, Proteomics, Cell Culture and Stem Cell Sciences, AMSBIO continues to offer a wide range of solutions from leading manufacturing partners and academic technology transfer departments. Key areas include cell migration, invasion, adhesion and proliferation where a number of platforms suitable for high content analysis are available. Growing cells in 3D is physiologically relevant and the most innovative set of products and technology currently commercially available for 3-D cell culture has been put together under the AMSBIO umbrella. These products are being used in key regenerative medicine therapy and cancer research as well as offering alternatives to the use of animals in biomedical research.

AMSBIO offers one of the biggest range of tissue products from a single source. RNA, DNA, protein and tissue sections and arrays are available from diseased and normal sources and multiple donor provision and prospective collection is also possible.

During 2009 3i sold its investment in AMSBIO to Alex Sim, the group’s interests are now represented in AMSBIO holdings. AMSBIO LLC was formed in 2011 to take control of Southern California based laboratory and physical distribution assets.

The global customer base continues to grow significantly and AMSBIO ships to most countries where life science research is being carried out. Key brands include Zymolyase, Cellufine, StemFit, alvetex, RNAbee and RNAStat all are now also available to US customers from AMSBIO LLC.

In 2010, AMSBIO is awarded ISO 9001 registration for supply of biological reagents, kits, chemicals, services and accessories to research laboratories.

AMSBIO LLC relocates from South California to new location in the key Biotech hub area of Cambridge, Massachusetts during 2015

AMSBIO partners with Dr Michele Zagnoni of University of Strathclyde in 2017 to launch new company, ScreenIn3D, to provide next generation microfluidic drug screening services.

Model HD-902-HR - Human Bladder cDNA-Random Primer