Company will become a fully integrated part of Roche Applied Science.
Roche’s purchase of NimbleGen for $272.5 million will extend its services to the microarray segment. “The Array Systems from NimbleGen are highly synergistic and will complement the existing Roche portfolio of innovative genomic research tools such as the LightCycler qPCR systems and the high-throughput sequencing systems from the recently acquired company 454 Life Sciences,” comments Severin Schwan, CEO Division Roche Diagnostics.
Worldwide, the microarray systems market has a size of about $600 million and showed 10% growth in 2006, according to Roche.
NimbleGen will become a fully integrated part of Roche Applied Science. NimbleGen reports that it will expand its portfolio in the near future to include higher density arrays, integrated instrument systems, and related reagents and consumables for advanced genome analysis.
Roche expects that the transaction will close in the third quarter of 2007. The company plans to maintain the current NimbleGen facilities in Madison, WI, Reykjavik, Iceland, and Waldkraiburg, Germany, as well as the company’s 140 employees.
