Hot off the press (well a few days anyway) Hologic has announced that they will acquire TWTI for $600 million...see releases below.
Hologic bought Cytyc last year for US$6 billion to expand their women's health franchise. Cytyc's lead product was ThinPrep which is the leading liquid based collection device for obtaining cervical samples to enable Pap and HPV tests to be run.
Cytyc tried to buy Digene, the pioneer of the HPV test back in 2002 but the deal was knocked back by the US Federal Trade Commission.
I imagine that Qiagen (which acquired Digene last August for US$1.6 Billion) logdement on Wednesday of an appeal against the IP dispute judgement relating to Digene's HPV patents is an effort to try to stymie the deal. Hologic would've signed off on TWTI's FTO for their IP in their due diligence so I give this little chance of threatening the success of this deal.
This is great news for GBI.
(1) It re affirms the appeal and value of the HPV testing space and also specifically demonstrates the appeal of genotyping HPV.
Note that Thirdwave's HPV test is still pending US FDA approval and its genotyped HPV test only genotypes 16 & 18 whereas GBI's does all 14 High Risk HPV types.
(2) It puts GBI well and truly on the radar of the instos that have made great money backing TWTI (thees guys have doubled their money in the last 12 months while the wider market has been crap)and also the big corporate players like BD who have an LBC test and now would be seriously looking at an HPV test to bundle it with (BD bought Tripath for its SurePath Liquid Based Cytology product).
This is awesome news for GBI!!!!!
Finally I also hear that all the seed investor selling has pretty much finished and the SP should rally nicely with any announcement this week.
