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| BioClinica CEO Mark Weinstein |
After a pair of deals to go private and merge with another company, BioClinica aims to expand its clinical trials software and services business in Asia without cutbacks--at least for now, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. And the newly privatized company's chief executive expects to capitalize on pharma giants' race to develop new drugs to replace those fallen off patent.
On March 12, BioClinica said that the private equity firm JLL Partners had wrapped up its tender offer of its stock for $7.25 per share, completing JLL's $123 million buyout of BioClinica announced in early February. The deal was revealed last month at the same time as news of a merger between BioClinica and core lab imaging provider CoreLab Partners, which merged with BioClinica last week. It's a big deal for the small yet growing world of electronic clinical trials, where BioClinica became a player through its 2008 buyout of electronic data capture provider Phoenix Data Systems.
Via the latest merger Newtown, PA-based BioClinica is absorbing the 300 employees and operations of Princeton, NJ-based CoreLab, which also brings a pair of offices in Asia to the combined company, the Inquirer reported. With about 580 employees of its own before the merger, BioClinica has expanded its workforce by about 50% and now has new Asian offices to complement its own operations.
One might expect a newly PE-owned outfit to wield its budget ax after a merger. Yet BioClinica CEO Mark Weinstein, who will now lead the merged and private company, told the Philadelphia newspaper that there are no cuts on the table. And the increasing sophistication of drug development in Asia could bode well for BioClinica.
"Now, companies are doing China studies for China drugs and India studies for India drugs," Weinstein told the newspaper. In the past, careful capture of clinical-trial data was "FDA-oriented because the U.S. is one of the few countries without cost controls, so drug companies could do well in the U.S. But that is changing. Other countries are creating their own FDA or modeling the agency after the FDA or something like the European Medicines Agency."
- here's the release about the JLL deal wrapping up
- check out the Inquirer's article
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