NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Tegal Corporation today announced a definitive agreement to buy CollabRx.
As part of the deal, Tegal will issue an aggregate of 236,433 shares of it common stock, or about 14 percent of its total shares outstanding prior to the closing, to former CollabRx shareholders in exchange for all of CollabRx's capital stock. Tegal also will assume $500,000 of existing debt from CollabRx through the issuance of five-year promissory notes in substitution for outstanding notes previously issued by CollabRx, and Tegal will grant a total of 368,417 restricted stock units and options to newly hired management and employees.
Tegal CEO Thomas Mika and CollabRx CEO James Karis, will serve as co-CEOs of the newly combined company. Karis will be appointed to the company's board of directors.
Tegal plans to keep its name and to trade on Nasdaq under its current ticker symbol "TGAL". At it annual meeting in September, though, it plans to seek shareholder approval to change its name to CollabRx. The new firm will be based in San Francisco.
CollabRx offers cloud-based systems "that provide clinically relevant interpretive knowledge to institutions, physicians, researchers, and patients for genomics-based medicine in cancer and other diseases to inform healthcare decision-making," it said in a statement. Its first commercially available product, CollabRx Therapy Finders provides information for determining which tests, therapies, and clinical trials may be useful in cancer treatment planning "with a specific emphasis on the tumor genetic profile."
"Medicine is entering a new era of low cost genome sequencing and the proliferation of personalized treatments based on specific genetic mutations," Karis said in a statement. "With the technology platform and expert system leadership position that CollabRx has developed over the past few years, we believe that the new company is in a position to lead the market for accurate, credible and current genomic information in the cancer space."