NEW YORK – Pacific Biosciences said on Tuesday that it has acquired Circulomics, a Maryland-based firm that makes kits for extracting high molecular weight DNA.
PacBio declined to disclose financial details of the deal, including Circulomics' revenues. In a statement, PacBio said "all customers will continue to receive Circulomics' product and world-class support." The pro forma financial impact of the acquisition is not expected to be material in 2021, PacBio said.
Circulomics, a Johns Hopkins University spinout originally focused on microRNA profiling, makes Nanobind technology, magnetic disks that help extract high-quality, high molecular weight DNA from multiple sample types and are used in several long-read genomics applications. The company also has a short DNA depletion kit. Circulomics received $2 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health in September 2020.
"One of our core strategies is to improve the front end of our sequencing workflows," PacBio CEO Christian Henry said in a statement. "The Nanobind technology that Circulomics has created is already proven in the market and will accelerate our efforts to make sample extraction and library preparation easier for our customers. By adding the team to PacBio we will be able to deeply integrate their technology into our workflows which will improve our entire long-read sequencing workflow."
The deal comes right after PacBio acquired short-read sequencing technology firm Omniome for $800 million last month.
PacBio has also obtained Circulomics' licensing agreements with Johns Hopkins University.