Citoxlab Group announces the acquisition of Xenometrics, an American CRO specialized in the non-clinical assessment of new drug candidates. This acquisition is the third one made by Citoxlab in North America further to the acquisition of the LAB Research Group (2011) and Accellab (2016). The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Xenometrics is a non-clinical CRO offering services in the fields of safety, pharmacology and pharmacokinetics to customers from the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and chemical industries.
Through this acquisition, Citoxlab Group reinforces its position in the non-clinical CRO arena, with consolidated revenues of $148 million (€128M) and a staff of 1,200, spread over seven sites in France (Evreux and Saint-Nazaire), Canada (Laval and Boisbriand), Hungary (Veszprem), Denmark (Copenhagen), and now in the USA (Kansas City).
"We were actively looking for an investment opportunity in the US as part of our growth strategy. This is important to better serve our US clients and I am very happy that we have identified the right opportunity with Xenometrics and successfully closed this acquisition. This CRO, created as a spin-off from a large pharma company, has tremendous non-clinical expertise and a strong reputation as a flexible organization capable of meeting the customers’ needs in project management during early development. This is really key, in particular for biotech companies that fight against time in order to reach milestones in their time-sensitive development plans,” Dr. Jean-Francois Le Bigot, Chairman and CEO of Citoxlab Group said. “Two other criteria were also critical in our decision: - the staff is exceptionally stable, which results in experienced people who not only know their job, but also the specific requests or habits of their clients, - the location in Kansas City which is easy to reach for most American customers. For all these reasons, I am very confident and very excited that this acquisition will allow us to provide more services and additional capacity to our client portfolio with an increase in study slots.”