Medical device company Cook Medical is to invest up to €16.5m over the next four years creating highly skilled positions in research and development activities at its Limerick site. The new investment, which is being made with Government support through IDA Ireland, will focus on two key projects. The first involves setting up a state-of-the-art research and development laboratory, which will foster innovation through enhanced collaboration with doctors and clinicians, developing new anatomical models to provide a more realistic environment for product evaluation and testing prior to commercial release. The second will establish Cook Ireland as the key site for R&D for the Zilver product line of peripheral intervention devices.…

DCU Invent-based company Digitary has secured funding from the UK government to build a secure document shared service for universities as part of a £12.5m investment under the Universities Modernisation Fund. The initiative will be the first service to go live in the UK’s ‘Higher Education Cloud’ which aims to bring the benefits of cloud computing to universities that have traditionally implemented standalone systems on-campus. Digitary was established as Framework Solutions in 1999 to provide security software design and development services for large corporate and third-party systems for clients such as Intel, Siemens and Baltimore Technologies. The company began working with the higher education sector in 2002 on the development…

Beam Inc, the company that owns Jim Beam, Courvoisier, Teacher’s and Canadian Club, has entered into an agreement to buy Irish whiskey producer Cooley Distillery for approximately US$95m. Cooley, which was set up in 1987, owns and produces the Kilbeggan, Connemara, Tyrconnell and Greenore brands.  It currently sells approximately 250,000 9-liter cases per year – divided among its brands, private label products and bulk sales to third-party customers – and has production capacity to support substantial future growth. The purchase price is approximately US$95m on a debt-free basis. Beam expects the acquisition to be earnings neutral in 2012 and increasingly accretive moving forward. The company, which is headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois…

There is good news today for those who see their future in the biotechnology sector, as University College Dublin and Elan Corporation announce a €3m initiative designed to create a leadership position in the global biotechnology industry. The UCD Elan initiative is expected to run for at least seven years and will include a newly appointed chair position – the Business of Biotechnology, which will sit at the intersection of the UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business and the UCD College of Science – as well as two new post-doctoral scholarships and an annual lecture series that highlights management leadership in the dynamic and ever-changing world of biotechnology on a…

So far this year, about 160 companies have closed each month, with liquidations accounting for 73pc, receiverships 26pc and examinerships 1pc of the insolvencies, according to figures out from Vision-Net. In the first 11 months of this year, 1,829 companies closed, leaving behind €1.15 billion of debt. This represents five companies closing each day, which is up 20pc on the same period last year. However, so far this year, 13,382 companies started trading, compared with 12,895 in the same period last year. Of the companies that began trading this year, 14,628 directors attached to them had been involved in a business before while 23,040 other directors were setting up for…