San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Life’s M&A Deal, Santarus, & More

Biotech laboratory pipettes

By far, the biggest life sciences news in the San Diego region over the past week was Thermo Fisher Scientific’s $13.6 billion acquisition of Life Technologies. I’ve compiled a special edition roundup of the deal, along with everything that happened in San Diego.

—In one of the biggest corporate buyouts San Diego has seen, Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: [[ticker:TMO]]) of Waltham, MA, agreed to pay $13.6 billion to acquire Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]), in a move intended to position the company to reap the gains of next-generation genetic sequencing technology. Both boards already have approved the deal.

—A replay of Thermo Fisher Scientific’s conference call to discuss their definitive agreement to acquire Life Technologies can be found here. The press release is here.

—Did the buyout represent a good deal for Life Technologies? The laboratory equipment and materials supplier’s stock traded at less than $55 a share before it disclosed that it was shopping for a buyer on Jan. 18. Thermo Fisher’s buyout offer of $76 a share represents a 38 percent gain from there, but as one stock-watcher wrote, Life shares are now “priced for perfection at high earnings multiples while the balance sheet will be highly leveraged.”

—The deal also poses implications for San Diego’s Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]), which last year spurned advances from the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche.

—U-T San Diego reporter Paul Sisson recalls the history of Life Technologies, beginning with Invitrogen, a company started in Encinitas, CA, by three San Diego scientists to sell kits that researchers could use to isolate and clone DNA.

—In other life sciences news, San Diego’s Pfenex and Agila Biotech of Bangalore, India, said they have entered

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.