Buzz about LabCorp’s secret intention to take over INC Research had just started to quiet down when the life sciences company announced a deal—a settled one—to acquire lab assets from Mount Sinai Health System.
LabCorp’s targets this time are seven patient service centers of Mount Sinai’s Clinical Outreach Laboratories in New York City metro area. The company already owns 120 such centers in that area before the deal, and its chairman and CEO David P. King described the market as critical in a press release. Nationally speaking, the company maintains a patient service centers network of more than 1,700 sites and 39 primary and specialty testing labs, making it one of the world's largest clinical testing providers.
Carlos Cordon-Cardo, chairman of the Department of Pathology at Mount Sinai said in the release that the decision to transfer the facilities to LabCorp was based on the latter’s “depth and breadth of services and track record of high quality.”
Through the acquisition, LabCorp will offer clinical pathology testing, including cytology and cytology-related molecular testing. Mount Sinai, while preserving services for patients at its hospital-based facilities, still support physicians’ laboratory testing requests in the areas of anatomic pathology, molecular pathology and genetics, said the release.
The already approved transaction will close in the first quarter of 2017. Other details of the deal were not disclosed. But it seems like the newly acquired labs will have little, if not none, interaction with LabCorp's recently adopted CRO Covance. An email response provided by LabCorp VP of Corporate Communications Donald Van Hagen said that services that Mount Sinai's outreach testing business provides are for patients seen in physicians’ offices, a field not commonly seen as part of a CRO.
The lab service giant bought New Jersey-based CRO Covance in a $6 billion deal in 2015, and news broke in April 2016 that it was in preliminary merger talks with INC Research, one of the largest CROs. Even though attention to that has died down recently, but it has not completely died out, as several analysts have noted that INC’s portfolio is complementary to that of Covance’s.
Editors Note: This story has been updated with corrected information on Covance HQ's location.