Burnaby’s Coastal Genomics has been acquired by UK-based Yourgene Health for up to USD $13.5 million.
According to GenomeWeb, Yourgene plans to pay an initial $3 million in cash and $2.5 million in equity, and a contingent consideration of up to $8 million in cash and equity.
Coastal Genomics has developed “Ranger Technology”, which automates a process known as agarose gel size selection to isolate DNA fragments of a desired length which is necessary for sequencing analysis.
Until now agarose gel size selection has largely been a manual, low efficiency process used to prepare DNA samples for sequencing.
Ranger Technology now enables processing of up to 96 DNA samples, reduces operating costs by 35% compared to the manual approach, processes DNA samples three times as quickly and reduces workspace requirements four-fold.
Yourgene has spent more than two years evaluating Coastal Genomics’ technology under a 2018 partnership and has already embedded it into two of its products.
Coastal Genomics was named to Rocket Builders’ 2020 Life Science Emerging Rockets list.