Sigma-Aldrich acquires BioReliance

Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (NASDAQ: SIAL), a leading Life Science and High Technology company, announced it has completed its acquisition of BioReliance Holdings, Inc., a leading provider of global biopharmaceutical testing services, from Avista Capital Partners for $350 million in cash, subject to normal post-closing adjustments. 

BioReliance provides critical services that include biologic, specialized toxicology and animal health testing to pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical, diagnostics, and other life science customers worldwide.  As a leading provider of biological safety testing, its service offering helps facilitate the development, manufacturing and commercialization of biological drugs and helps enable its clients to register their products worldwide. As a service provider of toxicology studies, BioReliance also enables its clients to launch new small molecule drugs worldwide.  BioReliance employs over 650 people and is headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, with additional operations in Glasgow and Stirling, Scotland and sales offices in Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore, India.

"BioReliance's global biopharmaceutical testing services will enable Sigma-Aldrich to build a specialized services platform that complements our existing products and technology strengths.  It will expand our participation in the fast growing biological drug market and will help forge deeper and stronger strategic ties with existing and new customers," said Rakesh Sachdev, President and CEO.

BioReliance will become part of SAFC, the custom manufacturing and services business unit of Sigma-Aldrich. Gilles Cottier, SAFC President commented, "The combination of BioReliance and SAFC provides a richer value proposition for the development and manufacture of biological drugs. By leveraging SAFC's industrial media presence and BioReliance's biological testing services, we can provide new and better end-to-end product solutions and services to our biopharmaceutical customers. The alliance also provides an opportunity to leverage our CompoZr® zinc finger nuclease (ZFN) technology with BioReliance's Toxicology and Animal Health Services operations for the development of new assays, cell lines and animal models for the Research marketplace."

BioReliance generated revenues of approximately $110 million in the year ended December 31, 2010 with double-digit growth expected in 2011.  The acquisition is expected to be modestly accretive to Sigma-Aldrich's diluted earnings per share in 2012.  Sigma-Aldrich funded the acquisition with a combination of existing cash and credit facilities.