Diagnostics giant Qiagen ($QGEN) will make a bid to acquire Vedbaek, Denmark-based Exiqon for about 683 million Danish kroner ($103.5 million), the company announced Tuesday. The Danish company specializes in molecular diagnostics and life science research tools.
Netherlands-based Qiagen will submit a conditional voluntary takeover offer to Exiqon shareholders to purchase all Exiqon shares.The buy is expected to extend Qiagen's reach in the RNA analysis arena, the company said in a statement.
Exiqon specializes in non-coding RNA, including microRNA and long non-coding RNA, which the company says show promise in cellular function and regulation. It offers a range of products, including its proprietary Locked Nucleic Acid (LNA) technology, which enhances specificity and sensitivity compared to traditional chemistries in next-generation sequencing, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and functional assays. The company reported net sales of approximately $20 million in 2015.
Exiqon would be the latest addition to Qiagen's stable, which includes the January 2015 purchase of Massachusetts-based Enzymatics, which saw Qiagen pick up all assets in the company's Enzyme Solutions Unit. Qiagen also came out with a new partner, ArcherDX, which Enzymatics took under its wing in 2013 to commercialize the former's Anchored Multiplex PCR (AMP) technology, which aims to address the bottlenecks in NGS in translational research.
Qiagen boasts myriad other partnerships, including a co-marketing deal with 10X Genomics, a companion diagnostics JV with molecular diagnostics player Biotype Diagnostics in Germany and a collaboration with Hitachi on molecular testing. And Qiagen has been aggressively pursuing deals in the companion diagnostics space, with more than 20 collaborative projects in motion, including its fourth tie-up with Eli Lilly ($LLY) launched last May.
- here's the release