Essen BioScience to be Acquired for $320 Million

Essen BioScience Inc., a pioneer and leader in the field of cell-based assays and instrumentation used for drug discovery and basic research applications, recently signed an agreement to be acquired by Sartorius, a leading partner to the biopharmaceutical industry and laboratories. Essen is currently owned by SFW Capital Partners, a specialized private equity firm that invests in mid-sized businesses providing analytical tools and related services. The transaction, which is subject to antitrust clearance, is expected to close by the end of the first quarter 2017.

Sartorius will purchase Essen BioScience for $320 million in cash. Having achieved strong double-digit growth during the past few years, Essen expects to generate sales revenues of approximately $60 million in 2017 with continued strong levels of operating profitability. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, and with sales entities in the UK and Japan, the company currently employs approximately 150 people.

Through this acquisition, Sartorius will significantly expand its portfolio for bioanalytics, a field the company has recently entered via the IntelliCyt acquisition in 2016. “With the Essen real-time, live-cell analysis platform, we will add another key technology for advancing and accelerating drug discovery applications to our lab divisions’ portfolio”, said Joachim Kreuzburg, CEO of Sartorius. “This powerful technology offers important synergies with our IntelliCyt business. Going forward, Sartorius will be able to provide our customers the broadest and, we believe, the most innovative portfolio for cell analysis in the industry.”

Novel analytical methods are crucial to enable scientific progress in the rapidly advancing areas of immuno-oncology, antibody discovery and stem cell research. Essen BioScience has specialized in instrumentation, software and reagents for real-time live-cell analysis for more than a decade. The information delivered to users accelerates discovery and development of new drugs and provides new insight and understanding into the mechanisms of disease.

Welcoming the transaction, Brett Williams, the President and CEO of Essen, said, “We are excited to become part of Sartorius as a ‘Center of Excellence’ and build an industry-leading cell analytics portfolio together with the Intellicyt business. This is not only a great opportunity to build upon Essen’s market-leading position, but also to continue development and introduction of transformative solutions for life sciences. In addition, we believe that the combination with Sartorius will provide exceptional opportunities for sustained growth and development for our employees, customers and business partners.”

Sartorius will update its 2017 financial guidance for the lab division and therefore also for the Sartorius Group post closure of the transaction.

About Essen BioScience

Founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1996, Essen BioScience develops and manufactures instruments, software, reagents and consumables which enable researchers to remotely image and quantitate a wide variety of cellular processes over time. The IncuCyte® System is a real-time quantitative live-cell analysis platform that enables visualization and quantification of cell behavior over time by automatically gathering and analyzing images around the clock within a standard laboratory incubator. The system allows researchers to make time-lapsed fully kinetic measurements from living cells over days and weeks thus providing insight into active biological processes in real time.

About Sartorius

The Sartorius Group is a leading international pharmaceutical and laboratory equipment provider with two divisions: Bioprocess Solutions and Lab Products & Services. Bioprocess Solutions with its broad product portfolio focusing on single-use solutions helps customers produce biotech medications and vaccines safely and efficiently. Lab Products & Services, with its premium laboratory instruments, consumables and services, concentrates on serving the needs of laboratories performing research and quality assurance at pharma and biopharma companies and on those of academic research institutes. Founded in 1870, the company earned sales revenue of more than 1.3 billion euros in 2016. Around 7,000 people work for the Group, which has its own manufacturing and sales sites in around 110 countries.