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

After a relatively slow March and April, business has picked up noticeably in May, June and July with deal volume increasing across all transaction model sectors. Here are the highlights from the past 4 weeks.

M&A
The most active seller of the month was Alere. Soon after announcing shareholder approval of the Abbott merger, Alere sold off strategic assets to clear the deck for antitrust approval of the deal. On July 17, Alere announced the sale of its Triage businesses to Quidel for $400 plus $40 million in contingent payments. The deal includes real estate, i.e., the triage business’s San Diego facilities, Alere’s MeterPro cardiovascular and toxicology assets and B-type Naturietic Peptide (BNP) assay. A week later, Alere announced that Siemens had agreed to buy its Epocal point-of-care blood diagnostic unit for an undisclosed price. The Quidel and Siemens sales are both contingent on consummation of the Alere-Abbott merger.

The other big story in M&A for the month was the appearance of a new and potentially significant player: Konica Minolta, which inked an agreement to purchase genetic testing firm Ambry Genetics for up to $1 billion in cash. According to a company spokesman, the deal represents the digital giant’s first step in leveraging its medical imaging capabilities to build a presence in the precision medicine market, first in Japan and then in Europe.

Strategic Alliances
In a month with intense deal volume, the collaborations pitting big labs with mass retailers were the sexiest of the new strategic alliances. There were not one but two such deals announced during the month—the first pairing Quest and Walmart followed a week later by a second deal co-starring LabCorp and Walgreens.

As per usual, most of the partnerships and alliance made in July involved genomics and molecular diagnostics. Notable examples:

• The 5-year partnership of Exploit Technologies and Biocartis to develop molecular breast cancer diagnostic tests to be run on the latter’s PCR-based Idylla platform;

• Trovagene’s latest venture into the Chinese market via collaboration with Chinese genomics service provider Novogene to commercialize Trovagene’s Next Collect device, which is currently approved for research use only; and

• EntroGen’s collaboration with the USC Norris Comprehension Cancer Center to evaluate the clinical utility of the former’s liquid biopsy real-time PCR test in lung cancer patients.

Here’s a graphic rundown of all the key diagnostic deals in late June and early July: