Shanghai, China-headquartered pharmatech company WuXi (NYSE: WX) has acquired NextCODE Health, a genomic analysis and bioinformatics company based in the USA.
The acquisition was made for $65 million in cash, and WuXi plans to merge its genome center with NextCODE Health to form a new company, WuXi NextCODE Genomics. The business will be headquartered in Shanghai and have operations in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Reykjavik, Iceland.
With the huge unmet medical needs in diseases with a genetic component and the rapid advances in genomics and bioinformatics, now is the right time for WuXi to make a strategic investment in this field, and NextCODE is the right partner. This new venture of WuXi NextCODE Genomics will create important new genomic and bioinformatic products and services to help make personalized treatment and medicine a reality. It will also enable doctors to provide better treatments to patients.
