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Takara Bio USA Acquires Curio Bioscience

NEW YORK – Takara Bio USA Holdings (TBUSH) said Wednesday that it has acquired spatial biology firm Curio Bioscience.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Takara Bio did not respond to a request for comment.

The Curio acquisition "will extend the power of Takara Bio’s NGS solutions and give customers deeper insights into tissue spatial organization and molecular composition," TBUSH, a wholly owned subsidiary of Japanese firm Takara Bio, said in a statement.

Houlihan Lokey acted as exclusive financial adviser and Cooley as legal adviser to Takara Bio for the deal. Meanwhile, Aquilo Partners acted as financial adviser and Dorsey & Whitney as legal adviser to Curio.

Based in Palo Alto, California, Curio has launched Seeker and Trekker, technologies that are based on the Slide-seq v2 and Slide-tags technologies, respectively, developed by researchers at the Broad Institute.

"Combining Curio’s technology with Takara Bio’s vast NGS and single-cell tool set will provide customers with industry-leading solutions for their spatial biology needs," Curio Cofounder and CEO Stephen Fodor said in a statement.

The acquisition is the latest reshuffling in the spatial omics space, where many companies, including Curio, are also embattled in patent infringement lawsuits with 10x Genomics.

In April of last year, Bruker announced the acquisition of NanoString Technologies for approximately $392.6 million in cash. NanoString had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February after receiving an unfavorable ruling in a lawsuit against 10x.

Last week, Quanterix announced the acquisition of Akoya Biosciences in an all-stock transaction for an undisclosed amount. After the acquisition, Quanterix plans to integrate Akoya's spatial biology capabilities with its own biomarker-detection tools for ultra-sensitive detection of protein biomarkers in blood and tissue.