Agreement to sell Guava Technologies

Mer­ck, a sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, announced the sign­ing of a defin­i­tive agree­ment to sell its Flow Cytom­e­try unit to Luminex Cor­po­ra­tion for €62.5 million.^1^ The clos­ing of the trans­ac­tion, expect­ed by the end of 2018, is sub­ject to cus­tom­ary clos­ing conditions.
Upon com­ple­tion of the trans­ac­tion, Luminex will own the flow cytom­e­try plat­forms Amnis and Gua­va and the asso­ci­at­ed reagents under those brands. This includes a port­fo­lio of lead­ing tech­nolo­gies serv­ing the research space. Mer­ck con­tin­ues to active­ly man­age its com­pre­hen­sive port­fo­lio by tap­ping into inno­va­tion and plac­ing it in the best hands to con­tin­u­ous­ly dri­ve val­ue for customers.

“This is an excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for both of our orga­ni­za­tions and I would like to extend my sin­cer­est thanks to our com­mit­ted col­leagues. Luminex is a long and trust­ed part­ner who has pro­vid­ed a wide range of solu­tions for clin­i­cal diag­nos­tics, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal drug dis­cov­ery and bio­med­ical research. Luminex shares our con­vic­tion to solve the tough­est prob­lems in life sci­ence. This will be a great new home for the team to build on their exper­tise and intro­duce more solu­tions to a broad­er base. At the same time, our exist­ing cus­tomers will get access to Luminex’s respect­ed prod­uct portfolio.”
Udit Batra, mem­ber of the Mer­ck Exec­u­tive Board and CEO, Life Science

The acqui­si­tion expands Luminex’s exist­ing offer­ing of flow-based detec­tion sys­tems, which is focused on its xMAP mul­ti­plex­ing tech­nol­o­gy, with more than 15,000 xMAP sys­tems sold world­wide. Merck’s ImageStreamX Mark II Imag­ing Flow Cytome­ter, for exam­ple, has extreme­ly high sen­si­tiv­i­ty and is used to detect and char­ac­ter­ize small particles.