Media and marketing services group Cogora has acquired PCM Healthcare, a London-based medical communications agency.
Cogora chief executive John Pettifor said: “Though we started life as a ‘traditional’ media company, we’ve also been operating in the agency space for some time now and we’ve been looking to build the size of the group in this area.
“We identified PCM right at the very beginning of that journey as a potential acquisition that would bring the very highest levels of technical expertise and clinical knowledge to the group, as well as broaden the geographic scope of our operations and bring their leadership position within European CME.”
The terms are the deal have not been disclosed, but the acquisition creates one of the UK’s largest independent healthcare agencies.
Cogora’s marketing services arm provides its clients with research, strategy and campaigns. The agency also has a number of media brands, among them Pulse, Nursing in Practice, The Commissioning Review, and Hospital Pharmacy Europe.
PCM delivers healthcare communications and non-promotional medical education to a range of clients, including Novartis, Gilead and Indivior. It will remain under the leadership of co-founders Alisa Pearlstone and Rob Miller, and will continue to operate from its Docklands base.
Pearlstone described the new partnership as creating an excellent synergy and promising ‘a significant boost to the PCM Healthcare offering’.
Cogora managing director Alex Beaumont told PMLiVE: “PCM Healthcare will now have access to Cogora’s resources, in particular our highly-engaged community of 220,000 healthcare professionals. The PCM team has been doing an incredible job under Rob and Alisa’s leadership and we believe that they will do a lot of exciting, innovative things with that extra reach.”
Beaumont added that “it is very much business as usual” for the newly-merged companies.