CHARLES RIVER BIDS FOR WUXI
CONTRACT RESEARCH: $1.6 billion
purchase is aimed at creating a
one-stop pharma services provider
SEEKING TO BROADEN its portfolio of services, Charles River Laboratories has agreed to pay $1.6 billion for Shanghai-based WuXi Pharma-Tech. The deal is aimed at forming a one-stop shop for
drug industry customers by combining WuXi’s chemistry expertise with Charles River’s clinical support
capabilities.
Bringing WuXi into the fold enables Charles River to
offer services ranging “from chemistry to man,” from
the earliest stages of drug discovery to the first tests of a
promising compound in humans, the company says. After the deal closes, Charles River will have roughly 12,200
employees. Combined 2009 sales were about $1.5 billion.
The acquisition “makes thematic sense,” but the
price tag is high, says Barclays Capital stock analyst
Douglas Tsao. WuXi posted sales of $270 million last
year, putting the deal’s price-to-sales ratio at a multiple normally reserved for intellectual-property-rich
companies in the medical device or biotech industries.
“They don’t have the same IP as a biotech. Their most
important assets are their people, and they walk out the
front door every day,” he says.
The success of the deal will hinge on drug companies’ willingness to entrust full programs to one service
provider. “We certainly have seen significant growth
in outsourced services, but it is unclear whether a one-stop shop is needed or wanted,” Tsao says.
Charles River executives might have felt the need to
make a bold move. Research service providers are un-
der pressure as major drug firms pare R&D and biotech
companies retrench from last year’s financial crunch.
Sales at Charles River dropped 11% to $1.2 billion in
2009, and earnings fell 22% to $156 million. In January,
the company decided to close its preclinical services
facility in Shrewsbury, Mass., eliminating 300 jobs.
PUBLISHING Texas A&M’s John Gladysz succeeds Organometallics’ founding editor
The American Chemical Society has appointed John A. Gladysz, distinguished
professor of chemistry and holder of
the Dow Chair in Chemical Invention at Texas A&M
University, as the new editor
of Organometallics. Gladysz
succeeds Dietmar Seyferth,
an emeritus chemistry professor at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, who
has served as editor since
helping to found the journal
in 1982.
With the help of his asso-
ciate editors, Gladysz says,
he plans to strengthen the journal’s posi-
tion as “the go-to source for cutting-edge
research and the latest developments in
the field.”
journal, his years as a chemistry profes-
sor in Germany serve to make him well-
known in the European organometallic
community.”
Born in 1952 in Kalamazoo, Mich.,
Gladysz earned a B.S. in chemistry at the
University of Michigan in 1971 and a Ph.D.
in organic chemistry at Stanford Univer-
sity in 1974. He joined the faculty of the
University of California, Los Angeles, later
that year and moved to the University of
Utah in 1982. He became chair of organic
chemistry at the University of Erlangen-
Nuremberg, in Germany, in 1998. A de-
cade later, he took up his current post at
Texas A&M.—SOPHIE ROVNER
