PerkinElmer Acquires Swedish Lab for Prenatal Testing Technology

PerkinElmer has acquired a Swedish laboratory in a bid to significantly expand its portfolio of prenatal testing products.

The Massachusetts-based PerkinElmer announced the acquisition of the Sollentuna, Sweden-based Vanadis Diagnostics. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Vanadis NIPT testing platform remains under development, but the company said it can zero in on cellfree DNA to perform prenatal diagnostics without sequencing or PCR amplification, cutting down the time to render test results and the amount of training for lab staff to operate its platform.

"We founded Vanadis with the mission to make NIPT available to all women, and we developed this technology to fundamentally change the cost structure and workflow for NIPT," said Vanadis Chief Executive Officer Olle Ericsson in a statement. "We are confident that with its leading position in prenatal screening, PerkinElmer is best situated to bring this system to market and address the under-served segment of average- risk pregnancies."

PerkinElmer officials suggested that the transaction would allow it to expand its prenatal testing capabilities without investing an enormous amount of money.

"High capital investment, advanced molecular skills, and complex data handling for lab staff, along with the difficulty of integrating these systems into the existing screening infrastructure, have been barriers to more widespread adoption of NIPT," said Prahlad Singh, head of PerkinElmer's diagnostics division. "Vanadis' simplified NIPT platform, once available, should help overcome these obstacles, giving labs a wider range of prenatal testing capabilities and providing important information to physicians and patients."

PerkinElmer has not provided a timeline as to when the development of the testing platform would be completed and it would be brought to the U.S. market.

The deal is part of a continuation of global transactions involving U.S. laboratories, the most notable one of recent years involving Eurofins' acquisition of Boston Heart Diagnostics for $200 million. However, most of the deals as of late have involved overseas operations acquiring U.S.-based labs.

Takeaway: PerkinElmer has targeted a small overseas lab as an inexpensive way of rapidly expanding its portfolio of prenatal assays.