More acquisitions on the 'Horizon' says UK drug discovery services firm CEO post IPO
The Cambridge, UK-based company supplies products and tools to pharma, biotech and genomic researchers and yesterday the firm reported revenues of £4.1m ($6.7m) for the first six months 2014, up 36% on the same period last year.
The results included one month’s revenue consolidation from CombinatoRx, a high-throughput screening business bought for £4.7m from Zalicus in June that complements Horizon’s gene editing and drug discovery business.
According to CEO Darrin Disley, the CombinatoRx deal has already helped drive growth bringing a number of sizeable service contracts to the firm, and further acquisitions will help grow the business further.
“We are continuing to look at opportunities that would enable rapid scalability of revenues, and the ability to enter adjacent markets not currently served by Horizon,” he told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
He added the £38m ($62m) investment raised in its initial public offering earlier this year would not be used “to fund long-term loss making operations,” but was “rather a 2 year deep investment phase that would deliver organic growth plus product in-licensing and corporate M&A.”
Already the firm offers a number of services and has a customer base of close to 1,000 organisations across nearly 50 countries – “including major pharmaceutical, biotechnology and diagnostic companies as well as leading academic research centres,” Disley said – with its core capabilities built around its proprietary translational genomics platform, Genesis.
“[Our] diverse, revenue-generating product and service offering is what marks Horizon as a non-traditional biotech,” Disley told us, “and our aim is to become a fully integrated company providing products, services and research programs to every stage of the human healthcare continuum, from sequence to treatment.”
