Quidel to buy up Abbott target Alere’s triage assets in $440M deal

San Diego-based diagnostics maker Quidel has penned a deal to acquire Alere’s triage assets as it boosts its position in the point of care (POC) market, as well as its geographic footprint.

The deal sees Quidel acquire the Triage business, including real estate for the San Diego Triage facilities, as well as its BNP business, for $400 million plus $40 million in contingent consideration.

Payment comes in a mix of cash and loans from Bank of America Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan Chase Bank.

For that price, the company gets its hands on Alere’s triage MeterPro cardiovascular and toxicology assets, and the B-type naturietic peptide (BNP) assay business run on Beckman Coulter analyzers.

The deal comes as some of Alere’s assets are being divested in order to gain antitrust approvals for Abbott’s pending acquisition of Alere.

Should that deal not go through, however, neither will this sale—that looked likely at the start of the year, when the pair were grappling over the merger, but back in April things got back on track when under the new terms, Abbott said it would fork over $51 per common share, bringing the deal’s value down to $5.3 billion from an original projections of $5.8 billion.

RELATED: Abbott, Alere bury the hatchet, agree on new acquisition terms

Triage MeterPro sales hit $146 million in 2016, while estimated revenues for the BNP business were $51 million for the same period. The Quidel deal should be done by the end of September this year.

Douglas Bryant, president and CEO of Quidel, said: “We’ve been looking at acquisition opportunities in high-growth segments of the POC diagnostics market, such as cardiovascular, for several years, and believe that this strategic acquisition extends Quidel’s market leadership, adding an extensive cardiovascular and toxicology POC offering to our innovative medical diagnostics portfolio."

“The Triage acquisition significantly stabilizes our quarterly revenue profile and enhances our geographic and product diversity, with substantial expansion opportunities in new markets. Further, while the installed base of Triage MeterPro instruments in the U.S. nicely complements the installed base of our Sofia and Solana platforms in the hospital segment, there will be new call points that our U.S. commercial organization can leverage as well. And internationally, the Triage MeterPro system gives us access to the rapidly evolving cardiac biomarker segment, one of the faster-growing segments in the IVD market.”