After stepping up to help bring the University of Oxford’s COVID-19 test to the masses—a collaboration that has since blossomed into a multiyear molecular diagnostics partnership—Prenetics is ready to make a bigger splash.
The Hong Kong-based test maker is reportedly hoping do so through a SPAC deal with the blank check company Artisan Acquisition Corp., a source close to the deal told CNBC.
Artisan Acquisition, based in the Cayman Islands, filed for a $300 million initial public offering in March and is now traded as "ARTAU" on the Nasdaq. It’s led by Adrian and Ben Cheng, members of the family behind the Hong Kong-based multibillion-dollar conglomerate New World Development.
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Merging with Prenetics will result in a new public company operating under the diagnostics developer’s name, with a still-unannounced ticker symbol to match.
The resulting company would reportedly have a valuation of at least $1.3 billion.And that number would likely continue to grow, as the source told CNBC that Prenetics is expected to reach annual revenues of $600 million by 2025—a massive jump from the $200 million projected for this year.
To gear up for the potential transaction, Artisan has already raised $339 million, according to CNBC. The SPAC has also secured another $60 million in forward purchase agreements from investment firms PAG and Aspex Management. UBS, Citi, Credit Suisse and CICC are reportedly serving as financial advisers to the deal.
RELATED: Oxford, Prenetics to take their COVID-19 rapid testing tech to other infectious diseases
Prenetics has spent the better part of the last decade developing DNA tests to assess the effects of a test taker’s genetics on their diet, drug response and disease risk. As of its latest $15 million funding round, which closed in September, Prenetics had raised a total of more than $60 million to support that work.
In the last year, like so many other diagnostics developers, it expanded its reach into COVID-19 testing. In addition to offering up its own Hong Kong network of labs to process tests, Prenetics teamed up with Oxsed, the molecular diagnostics spinout from the University of Oxford and OSCAR, its Suzhou, China-based research center.
That collaboration started with Prenetics helping validate Oxsed’s low-cost rapid COVID test and then, in October, acquiring Oxsed to scale up the test for use in international airports.
Building on the success of their work together, Oxford and Prenetics earlier this year formed a three-year, multimillion-dollar partnership to bring the fast-acting molecular testing technology behind the COVID test to other infectious diseases.
Their new Prenetics Innovation Technology Centre for Advanced Molecular Diagnostics, located on OSCAR’s Suzhou campus, opened this month, kicking off the partners’ work to develop affordable point-of-care tests led by experts in bio-sensing, clinical virology, microbiology and medical devices.