Evotec to Pay $300M for Aptuit

Evotec AG will acquire Aptuit for $300 million, strengthening its position in the external innovation marketplace. As a partner research organization for integrated outsourced drug discovery and development solutions, Aptuit offers synergistic scientific expertise across drug discovery, pre-clinical testing and both drug substance and drug product manufacturing to its biopharma partners.

Aptuit provides a complete set of integrated early discovery to mid-phase drug development services in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. It has approximately 750 employees, mainly scientists, working across three state-of-the-art discovery, development and manufacturing facilities in Europe (Verona, Italy; Basel, Switzerland; and Oxford, UK). It completed more than 1,000 projects in 2016 for over 400 customers across small, medium and large biopharma.

The acquisition of Aptuit grows Evotec's business substantially and extends the value chain offering through to investigational new drug (IND) submission and beyond to integrated drug substance and drug product and commercial manufacture. Evotec's business model increasingly relies on the progression of pre-clinical candidates through to the clinic and beyond. With Aptuit's IND enabling capabilities, especially through the INDiGO platform, Evotec will increasingly control and accelerate the IND submission of its partnered products.

"Bringing together two major players in the drug discovery industry is a big step forward for Evotec to expand our unique focus in external innovation for pharma, biotech and foundations," said Werner Lanthaler, chief executive officer, Evotec.

Jonathan Goldman, chief executive officer, Aptuit, said, "I am delighted that Aptuit's unique value proposition of world-class scientists have combined with the Evotec team to create a best-in-class company. The operational management team and I look forward to continuing to offer customers an expanded set of solutions in discovery as part of the Evotec family as well as providing an end-to-end solution in candidate to IND (INDiGO) and Phase I to commercial integrated CMC needs."