Sartorius ups bioanalysis business with $320m Essen acquisition
German bioprocessing tech and services company the Sartorius Group said today it is shilling out $320m (€304m) in cash for Michigan, US-based Essen BioScience in order to “significantly expand its portfolio for bioanalytics.”
Essen offers a number of reagents and consumables to the biopharma industry, but its proprietary IncuCyte live-cell count and analysis system will be a key technology for advancing and accelerating Sartorius’ drug discovery applications to its lab divisions’ portfolio, Joachim Kreuzburg – CEO of Sartorius – said.
The platform, which can fit into drugmakers’ existing workflow, offers non-invasive quantitative analysis to monitor cell health and viability and live-cell assays, along with real-time kinetic data.
After entering the space in 2015 through the acquisition of Edinburgh, UK-based CRO BioOutsource, Sartorius has been on a bioanalysis tech spending spree.
IntelliCyt was acquired in June 2016 for $90m, adding the I Que Screener high-throughput cell analysis tech to Sartorius’ bioanalytics division. The following month the firm expanded further in the space by adding ViroCyt’s virus counting platform for $16m.
The latest addition “offers important synergies with our IntelliCyt business,” Kreuzberg said in a statement. “Going forward, Sartorius will be able to provide our customers the broadest and, we believe, the most innovative portfolio for cell analysis in the industry.”
The deal is expected to close by the end of the first quarter 2017.
