Agilent to acquire Seahorse Bioscience

SANTA CLARA, Calif. & BILLERICA, Mass.—Agilent Technologies Inc. and Seahorse Bioscience have inked a definitive agreement by which Agilent will acquire Seahorse Bioscience. The privately held company was founded in 2001, and is based in Billerica, Mass., with manufacturing operations in Chicopee, Mass., and regional offices in Copenhagen, Denmark and Shanghai. Seahorse Bioscience has approximately 200 employees, most of whom are expected to join Agilent in the wake of this transaction.

Agilent will pay $235 million in cash to acquire Seahorse Bioscience. The deal is subject to customary closing conditions and regulations, but it is expected to close by Nov. 1. Agilent expects the transaction to be accretive in fiscal year 2016.

"Seahorse Bioscience's unique technology is the perfect complement to Agilent's market-leading separations and mass spectrometry solutions, in particular for metabolomics research and disease research in pharma," Patrick Kaltenbach, president of Agilent's Life Sciences and Applied Markets Group, said in a press release. "The combination of these two platforms gives scientists a more comprehensive and faster path to researching the most challenging diseases affecting mankind. Seahorse's team and technology are an ideal fit for Agilent and for our customers, and we look forward to bringing them on board."

Seahorse Bioscience's proprietary XF technology enables research into the role of cell metabolism in a variety of diseases and conditions, including neurodegeneration, aging, cancer, cardiovascular disease, cell physiology, toxicology and hepatobiology, immunology, infectious diseases, mitochondrial diseases, model organisms, obesity, diabetes, metabolic disorders, screening and translational medicine.

"We are proud to have enabled the exploration of bioenergetics in living cells by nearly 10,000 scientists worldwide, and to have created a new category of cell-based assay tools," commented Jay Teich, CEO of Seahorse Bioscience. "Joining Agilent, a premier, customer-focused supplier of technology to a much broader market, will give many more researchers access to Seahorse tools. And when these two technology-rich companies combine, we expect to offer a series of new products and applications that will benefit our customers."

As noted on the company website, the XF Analyzers “measure oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and extracellular acidification rate (ECAR) at intervals of approximately five to eight minutes. OCR is an indicator of mitochondrial respiration, and ECAR is largely the result of glycolysis.” The XFp Extracellular Flux Analyzer produces metabolic data to aid in verifying gene expression changes or phenotypes while the XFe Extracellular Flux Analyzers can simultaneously interrogate mitochondrial respiration and glycolysis in a microplate in real-time.