Horizon Discovery Acquires Sage Labs In $48M Deal
By C. Rajan, contributing writer
U.K.-based Horizon Discovery has agreed to acquire Sage Labs in St. Louis for up to $48 million in cash and shares. With this latest acquisition, Horizon is now the world’s leading gene-editing and translational genomics company.
Horizon Discovery Group is an international life science company that provides research tools to support gene-editing, translational genomics, and personalized medicines development. The Sage Labs acquisition is an important one for the Horizon group, as Sage is a world leader in advanced in vivo transgenic disease models for preclinical research applications.
The acquisition will result in a fully integrated translational genomics platform, which will significantly expand Horizon’s product, service, and research base. Sage Labs also had total assets of $14.5 million at the beginning of this year and has benefitted from investments of over $25 million.
Dr. Darrin M Disley, CEO of Horizon Discovery Group, said, “The acquisition positions Horizon as the world-leader in gene-editing and at the forefront of technological advances in the field of translational genomics. The consolidated offering significantly strengthens Horizon commercially, allowing us to offer product, service, and R&D programs to customers engaged at every stage of translational genomics and personalized medicine research from sequence to treatment.”
In acquiring Sage Labs (previously a unit within Sigma Aldrich), Horizon will gain exclusive access to ZFN for in vivo model generation and certain CRISPR in vivo-related intellectual property. Other assets and capabilities acquired from Sage include a custom engineered in vivo model development service, inventories of ready to use in vivo models, and molecularly annotated patient-derived xenograft (PDx) models, as well as custom development capabilities.
Disley said the latest acquisition will also strengthen Horizon’s U.S. and EU sales forces, fortify its IP portfolio, and will provide significant additional revenue. The acquisition is expected to be completed on October 2, 2014.
This is Cambridge-headquartered Horizon’s second acquisition of an American company in the past few months. In June, Horizon acquired CombinatoRx service business and assets from Zalicus, in turn adding several valuable services to its pre-clinical discovery portfolio, such as high-throughput screening, drug combination sciences, and scalable bioinformatics expertise.
Some other recent U.S. deals for Horizon include a non-exclusive license agreement with the Broad Institute for the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology, and another non-exclusive license agreement with Stanford University for the AAV (Adeno-Associated Virus) gene delivery technology.