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

Good news for any of you who slept through December 2017: You didn’t miss much—at least as far as blockbuster strategic deals in the clinical laboratory space are concerned.

M&A
In contrast to December2016, the final month of 2017 was short on new deals with most of the action representing closings of transactions announced earlier in the year, headlined by the Dec. 21 closing of PerkinElmer’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Euroimmun, the year’s fifth biggest M&A deal.

One significant piece of new business was the announcement that Genoptix has agreed to acquire Rosetta Genomics for $10 million in cash. The year 2017 was a rough one for Rosetta. After layoffs, divestment of its PersonalizeDx firm less than two years after acquisition and continued threat of Nasdaq delisting for failure to meet the exchange’s $1 minimum bid requirement, it probably makes sense for the firm to be absorbed as a wholly owned subsidiary of Genoptix. The deal also makes tons of sense for Genoptix, which acquires Rosetta’s RNA-based technology assets.

Meanwhile, the market continues to feel the shakeout from the Abbott-Alere deal of October. Quidel was one of the beneficiaries of the merger, picking up the B-type naturietic peptide (BNP) assay business that Alere had to divest to clear the way for the Abbott merger. But on Nov. 27, Beckman Coulter filed a legal challenge to Quidel’s exclusive rights to sell the assay, which runs on Beckman Coulter’s analyzers, asking a California federal court to declare its right to sell the assay to its own customers. For its part, Quidel has declared its intention to fight back and defend its exclusive sales rights.

Impetus for strategic activity in the labs sector is also being supplied by another major M&A deal—Becton Dickinson’s planned acquisition of CR Bard. In December, BD announced that it has agreed to sell its soft tissue core needle biopsy products to Merit Medical Systems to secure antitrust clearance for the Bard deal.

Strategic Alliances
One of the most significant trends in 2017 alliance-making, namely, collaboration between labs and the biopharma sector, continues to predominate. Notable new examples from late November/early December include:

• A $2.9 billion, 18-month venture between AstraZeneca and Chembio Diagnostics to develop a quantitative, reader-based point-of-care test leveraging the latter’s dual-path-platform immunoassay technology; and
• A collaboration between Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Genomic Health to evaluate the effectiveness of the latter’s Oncotype DX Genomic Prostate Score in identifying patients who would benefit from prostate cancer drugs in Janssen’s R&D pipeline.

Another of 2017’s big alliance trends, product integration, was also well represented. For example, two months after announcing integration of its Face2Gene NGS phenotyping products with Ambry Genetics’ AmbryPort 2.0 clinical ordering system, FDNA announced a similar deal involving testing and interpretation services from PreventionGenetics;

Here’s a graphic summary of the key diagnostic deals from late November through December: