Major pharmaceutical company Roche has invested $1 billion in order to become the majority owner of Foundation Medicine. The company that has been invested in sells oncology tests to personalize cancer treatments. The two companies will share research and development data.
The financial website Xconomy described the move as: “a significant gamble on the as-yet-unrealized potential of tests that aim for broad genetic profiles of cancer patients’ tumors.”
Writing in Bloomberg, Samir Devani said: “Pharma companies are increasingly looking for patient populations that are going to benefit most from their drugs, and diagnostics is an integral part of that process. This shows that treatments will become more and more individualized.”
In other pharma related business news, the Irish drugmaker Shire has purchased the U.S. company NPS Pharmaceuticals. The price paid is $5.2 billion. According to a statement issued by Shire, after merging NPS would be better situated to get drugs onto the European market, and Shire can exploit NPS’s high-price drug Gattex, which is used to treat short bowel syndrome, as well as other rare disease treatments in development.
Shire’s bid comes shortly after a deal fell through to purchase North Chicago-based company AbbVie. This deal fell through, The New York Times reports, in October 2014 as the Obama administration tightened tax rules concerning such overseas mergers.
Earlier this month, Digital Journal outlined Roche’s expansionist plans. Only a few weeks ago, Roche paid an undisclosed price to acquire Bina Technologies, a bioinformatics company.
