Diagnostic Deals: A Roundup of the Key Mergers, Acquisitions, Alliances, Licenses and Other Strategic Transactions From the Past Month

The strategic deal making pot continues to boil, despite the relative inactivity of the established market leaders like Quest, LabCorp and Abbott. Here’s a look at the trends and major deals from late June to late July.

Mergers & Acquisitions and Asset Sales

The biggest M&A deal of the period was Agilent Technologies’ agreement to acquire BioTek Instruments for $1.17 billion in cash. Expected to close in the fourth quarter, the deal will expand Agilent’s position in the cell analysis market which the firm first entered in 2015 by acquiring Seahorse Bioscience. Coupled with last year’s acquisitions of Luxcel Biosciences and ACEA Biosciences, the BioTek deal is expected to boost Agilent’s annual cell analysis revenues above $250 million, according to company sources. “By combining BioTek’s offerings with Agilent’s, we will deliver a breadth of differentiated workflows, enabling customers to obtain deeper, more reliable insights across a variety of cell analysis applications,” noted Jacob Thaysen, president of Agilent’s life sciences and applied markets group, in a statement.

In addition to the deals summarized in the chart below, Evotec, a publicly traded global drug discovery and development company based in Hamburg announced that it has acquired intellectual property related to iPSC-based phenotypic drug discovery and an existing iPSC-derived cells products business from Ncardia, a privately held stem cell drug and discovery company with offices in Belgium, the Netherlands and US. As part of the acquisition, Evotec is also taking on 17 stem cell biology experts who have expertise in generating multiple disease-relevant cell types from iPSCs and applying them in drug discovery.

In announcing the deal, Evotec said that combining these assets and knowledge with its own iPSC expertise and drug-discovery platforms will create new biological research opportunities and enhance new and existing partnerships. “Additional expertise and capacity in the iPSC space as well as a substantial partner network will allow us to further accelerate our efforts to build a world-leading iPSC translational biology platform across different disease areas,” said Cord Dohrmann, CSO of Evotec.

Strategic Alliances

Companies making strategic alliance news this busy month include 23andMe, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Illumina and Precipio. Helomics, a division of Predictive Oncology, was especially busy, announcing three new partnerships.

Here’s a summary of key diagnostic deals announced from late June through the third week of July: