GE Healthcare has made a major move to boost its efforts in life sciences with the purchase of three businesses from Thermo Fisher Scientific.
GE Healthcare – a unit of General Electric – will pay just over $1bn to take control of Thermo Fisher’s cell culture, gene modulation and magnetic beads divisions.
According to GE Healthcare’s president and CEO John Dineen, the deal will help the company keep up with increased demand for improved diagnostics and new, safer medicines.
“This deal makes a good business even better and will help us realise our vision of bringing better healthcare to more people at lower cost,” he said.
If the deal is approved, all three units will be incorporate into GE Healthcare’s Life Science divisions, which includes medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems and drug discovery.
Of the businesses at the heart of the deal, Thermo Fisher’s HyClone cell culture technology will support GE Healthcare’ working in manufacturing medicines to treat diseases such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, as well as the development of vaccines.
The gene modulation technology will complement GE Healthcare’s existing technologies in drug discovery and Thermo Fisher’s magnetic bead products will extend GE Healthcare’s capabilities in protein analysis and medical diagnostics.
As part of Thermo Fisher’s analytical technologies business, the three units had combined revenue of $250m in 2013.
This revenue would add a reasonable chunk to GE Healthcare’s performance, with the division reporting sales of $4.3bn for the first three months of 2013.
The deal follows other expansion plans by GE Healthcare, including a $2bn investment in software for healthcare systems and applications. Announced last summer, this investment focuses on the convergence of machine and intelligent data.