JSR Life Sciences Snaps Up CRO in $400M Deal

The parent company of JSR Life Sciences snapped up contract research organization Crown Bioscience International for $400 million, the company announced this morning.

Acquiring Crown provides JSR with a position in the contract research and development capabilities space. The deal is JSR’s largest acquisition to date, the company said in a statement. Eric Johnson, president of JSR’s life sciences division, said the deal will position JSR as "the clear choice for innovation-driven strategic partnerships." CrownBio is an ideal fit for the company, he added.

"We’re bringing together innovative competencies that will lead to better solutions for pharma and improve their ability to take therapeutics to the market," Johnson said in a statement.

Crown Bioscience is a company focused on developing platforms to advance research into oncology and metabolic disease. In August 2016, Crown named Jean Pierre Wery as the new chief executive officer of the company.

CrownBio’s patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models, are becoming fundamentally important to the development and commercialization of diagnostics and therapeutics, JSR said. Last year, Crown launched its OmniScreen cell panel screening platform. Researchers can enroll their compounds into CrownBio’s OmniScreen where they will be able to observe data in real time. OmniScreen will be run on a cycled schedule every three months, allowing clients to select from three panels of cell lines that are most suitable for their needs, according to the company.

For the past two years, JSR has been flexing its M&A muscle to increase its presence. The company acquired majority interest of contract development and manufacturing organization KBI BioPharma and MBL Corporation in 2015. Earlier this year, JSR acquired mammalian cell line development pioneer Selexis SA. All of those acquisitions together combine to make JSR into a "strong technology engine for innovation," the company said.

JSR’s goal is to be the clear choice for innovation-driven strategic partnerships with pharmaceutical players, a company spokesperson said in an email to BioSpace. JSR now offers a wide variety of "innovative competencies" that will lead to better solutions for pharma and improve its ability to bring new therapeutics to the market.

With Crown added to its offerings, JSR will employ a "full suite of integrated capabilities," the company said. Those capabilities include research, drug discovery, diagnostics development, cell-line development and process development.

With the acquisition of CrownBio, JSR said it expects to see revenue and EBITDA margin of $90 million and $20 million, respectively in 2018.

"JSR envisions that CrownBio’s development capabilities will enhance the contribution of JKiC, the company’s Japan-based industry-academia-medicine collaboration hub, by providing the tools and expertise to translate leading-edge research into tomorrow’s medicines," the company said in a statement.