A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

In a move that apparently brings an end to the auction competition targeting the acquisition of Biosite (San Diego), Beckman Coulter (BC; Fullerton, California) late Monday issued a statement saying that it will not increase its $90-a-share offer for Biosite, saying that that a higher bid would not be “in the long-term interests” of its stockholders.

That decision appears to make Inverness Medical Innovations (IMI; Waltham, Massachusetts) the winning bidder, after its move late last week to increase its offer by $2.50 a share to $92.50.

Scott Garrett, president/CEO of BC, said in a company statement, “Our priority throughout this process has been to create sustainable value for Beckman Coulter’s shareholders. We continue to believe the combination of Biosite with Beckman Coulter is strategically sound. At $90 per share, our revised merger agreement includes a full and fair price for Biosite, and with all regulatory clearances associated with this transaction already in hand, is highly certain.”

Garrett went on to say that Biosite’s board had informed BC that IMI’s offer was superior to its own latest revised, and increased, bid. He added: “Although we do not agree with this conclusion, we expect that Biosite will terminate its existing merger agreement with Beckman Coulter and, concurrently, pay Beckman Coulter a termination fee of $54 million.”

IMI said that its offer will remain on the table until Friday, thus still giving BC time to reconsider its decision.

BC’s most recent move for the company was in matching IMI’s previous offer of $90-a-share, putting the deal value at $1.64 billion.

The bidding war for Biosite was launched in March when BC made an initial offer to buy the company with an $85-a-share bid (about $1.55 billion), a 53% premium over the stock closing price at the time of the offer.

IMI, already an owner of 4.9% of Biosite’s stock, then created the auction scenario when in April it responded with its unsolicited $90-a-share bid. IMI”s offer also includes a payment to Biosite equal to the BC termination fee.

The three companies are involved in producing diagnostic products. IMI’s specialty is in pregnancy and fertility testing and it is looking, with the purchase of Biosite, for major growth in the immunoassay and cardiac diagnostic sectors.

In other dealmaking news:

• IMI also reported last week that it acquired Benelux distributor Orange Medical (Tilburg, the Netherlands) in an all cash deal for about 14.2 million ($5.7 million).

IMI said that its acquisition of Orange Medical, which has companies in the Netherlands and Belgium, will increase its direct distribution network for its professional diagnostic products into Benelux. It said the acquisition is consistent with its efforts to continue to improve margins by bringing distribution in-house.

• Sage-N Research (San Jose, California) has been granted a sublicense from Thermo Fisher Scientific (Waltham, Massachusetts) to sell SEQUEST search engine products worldwide. The agreement provides for Sage-N to develop and sell products using the patented proteomic search engine technology. No financial terms were disclosed.

Sage-N becomes the first company to join Thermo as the only companies licensed by the University of Washington to commercialize its SEQUEST technology, embodying intellectual property described in a U.S. patent covering proteomic search engines.

“Proteomics technology holds great promise to uncover medical breakthroughs at the molecular level,” said Dr. John Yates, III, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, California), primary inventor of the SEQUEST technology.

Sage-N uses SEQUEST technology as an embedded component within plug-and-play solutions. Sorcerer-SEQUEST is optimized for Orbitrap mass spectrometers with an isotope search mode, and with automated reversed peptide generation for decoy database strategies that accurately estimate False Positive rates while maximizing sensitivity.

Future products are planned to incorporate application-optimized versions of the base SEQUEST technology in focus areas such as biomarker discovery for drug efficacy and safety, phosphorylation site localization for cancer research, and real-time protein identification within the mass spectrometer.

Sage-N is a supplier of Integrated Data Appliances (IDAs) for proteomics research through collaborations with scientists and companies.

• New England Biolabs (NEB; Ipswich, Massachusetts) said it has licensed the Ergo bioinformatics software developed and maintained by Integrated Genomics (Chicago). Financial terms were not disclosed.

NEB will use the ERGO genome analysis tools for gene annotation, metabolic reconstruction and enzyme data-mining as well as for comparative genomics purposes.

Optimized for analysis of microorganisms, Ergo integrates biological data from genomics, biochemistry, gene expression studies, genetics and literature. Ergo contains more than 1180 genomes at various stages of completion, as well as the largest available collection of networked cellular pathways.