NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – GE is buying Thermo Fisher Scientific's cell culture media, gene modulation, and magnetic beads business for about $1.06 billion, the companies announced today.
In aggregate the three businesses generated approximately $250 million in revenues in 2013. Thermo Fisher said it would sell the business in November in order to expedite approval by the European Commission of the company's $13.6 billion buy of Life Technologies. Isaac Ro of Goldman Sachs said at the time that the three businesses comprise less than 2 percent of Thermo Fisher's total revenues.
The Thermo Fisher-Life Tech deal is awaiting approval from the US Federal Trade Commission and is anticipated to be completed early this year.
GE said that today's deal expands its "offering of technologies for the discovery and manufacturing of new medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics in its growing Life Sciences business." Thermo Fisher's HyClone cell culture media and sera products "are highly complementary to GE Healthcare's established technologies for cell biology research and biopharmaceutical manufacturing, enabling GE to offer its customers a substantially wider range of technologies and services," they said.
Thermo Fisher's gene modulation business also complements GE's technologies for drug discovery research, while the Sera-Mag magnetic beads product line extends GE's technologies in protein analysis and medical diagnostics, they added.
The transaction is anticipated to close in the first half of the year.