Clinical Data is moving forward with its initiative to sell off some of its assets in order to advance its late stage drug development programs. The company announced today that it has completed an agreement with Fullerton, CA-based biotech Beckman Coulter for the sale of its genomics services division, Cogenics. For $17 million, Beckman Coulter will acquire all of Cogenics' operations in the U.S., U.K., Germany and France. Clinical Data will get to keep $2 million in sales from Cogenics and will receive another $15.4 from Beckman at closing, which is expected happen this month.
"This important transaction represents an integral part of our strategic plan to focus our resources on developing targeted therapeutics and advancing proprietary biomarker programs," said Drew Fromkin, President and CEO of Clinical Data. "The sale of Cogenics to Beckman Coulter also creates substantial near-term value and cost savings through the divestiture of a non-core program as we approach the completion of our Phase III registration trial of vilazodone, expected in the second calendar quarter of 2009."
The Cogenics unit will compliment Beckman Coulter's Agencourt Biosciences' business, which offers genomic services and nucleic acid purification products, the company said in a statement. "We are excited about the new opportunities and confident that these combined offerings will enable us to meet the full spectrum of service requirements--sequencing, genotyping, gene expression, and DNA and RNA extraction--for researchers around the world," said Susan Evans, Vice President and General Manager of Agencourt.
- read the joint release