Caprion Biosciences said today it has acquired Primity Bio for an undisclosed price, in a deal designed to expand the buyer’s immunology and molecular profiling service offering, as well as its ability to support its clients worldwide.
Based in Fremont, CA, Primity is a provider of flow cytometry services with expertise in assay development, early drug discovery, pre-clinical animal sample analysis, biomarker discovery, and advanced human clinical sample analysis.
“The acquisition of Primity Bio provides us access to highly complementary and well-differentiated biomarker and immune monitoring services while considerably expanding our geographic reach to better support the global clinical needs of our clients,” Caprion President and CEO Martin Leblanc said in a statement.
Headquartered in Montreal, Caprion provides specialized immunology and proteomics laboratory services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. Caprion’s immune monitoring business unit, ImmuneCarta, offers proprietary multiparametric flow cytometry services for functional analyses of innate and adaptive immune responses.
Caprion's proteomics business unit, ProteoCarta, offers proprietary gel-free, label-free mass spectrometry (MS) for comprehensive, quantitative, and robust comparative measurement of proteins across large sets of biological samples for the discovery and validation of protein biomarkers. The platform has also enabled the deployment of novel services to identify and quantify neoepitopes, as well as to analyze pharmacokinetically and characterize host cell protein impurities of biologic drugs.
“Joining forces with Caprion will provide critical commercial channels to deliver our innovative services to a broader array of global biopharma partners and facilitate the launch of our distributed cloud computing flow cytometry analysis software, CellEngine,” said Peter Krutzik, Ph.D., CEO of Primity Bio.
Dr. Krutzik and Tom Wehrman, Ph.D., co-founded Primity in 2010, with the aim of bringing innovative flow cytometry platforms to biopharma for use throughout the drug discovery process, from lead selection through clinical trial sample analysis.
Primity’s discovery unit provides specialized platforms that include profiling of cell surface and intracellular signaling proteins, high-speed fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), and deep interrogation of drug mechanism of action. Primity's clinical unit delivers fully customized and complex immunophenotyping, receptor occupancy, and cell signaling assays of clinical samples for exploratory pharmacodynamic analysis.
Primity also offers analysis of pre-clinical and clinical samples by via mass spectrometry or cytometry by time-of-flight (CyTOF), which expands the number of measurable biomarkers per sample to more than 35.
Leblanc said the Primity acquisition built on Caprion’s 2016 purchase of the immune monitoring laboratory of ImmuneHealth in Gosselies, Belgium—a deal that expanded Caprion’s footprint into Europe: “This US expansion and the opportunity to work with the highly talented and innovative scientific team at Primity significantly enhances our ability to deliver on Caprion's service diversification and international expansion strategy.”
Both the Primity and ImmuneHealth acquisitions occurred after Caprion was acquired for an undisclosed price from Chicago Growth Partners and recapitalized by GHO Capital Partners in July 2016. Caprion was founded in 2000.
