In February 2020, OncoDNA raised EUR 19 million in a Series B financing round. Now the Belgian molecular profiling company has found a complementary acquisition target that will allow offering the whole value chain from genetic sequencing to clinical applications.

On July 8th, 2020, OncoDNA announced a friendly takeover bid for all shares of IntegraGen (Paris: ALTIN), a genetic sequencing services company based in Evry, France. The offer values IntegraGen at EUR 14.5 million. If the deal goes through as planned, the combined entity will employ around 100 people, with sales above EUR 13million.

Founded in 2001, IntegraGen is a reference partner for teams working in molecular genetics research. The company employs geneticists, clinical practitioners, and biostatisticians and runs one of the largest genetic sequencing labs in France with state-of-the-art Illumina sequencing equipment.

The bid is pending approval from the French financial market authorities. The first offer to IntegraGen shareholders is planned to be open from September to mid of October. OncDNA does not intend to make a squeeze-out (threshold at 90%). Therefore, OncoDNA would hold a majority stake in a listed company. It is less likely that IntegraGen could be taken private. For now, OncoDNA’s management wants to focus on the integration of the two companies.

The two companies are highly complementary, explains OncoDNA’s CEO and founder, Jean-Pol Detiffe. Its main product OncoKDM, which is used to give personalized treatment recommendations for cancer patients is focussed on reporting on the clinician. (For further background information, read our interview with a French oncologist who is successfully using the product.) It works with pre-formatted, small batches of data, and takes around 300 genes into account.

IntegraGen’s offering, on the contrary, is focussed on the raw data stemming from sequencing machines, the complete human data set of 22’000 genes. But the company lacks the means to interpret this data, which is one of OncoDNA’s core strengths. Its bio-informatics database contains over 3’000’000 genetic variants, 600 cancer drugs, data from 2’000 clinical trials, and the results of over 15,000 tests OncoDNA has performed for patients so far.

It is not just the product scope, but also the employee base which is very complimentary, both in technical skills and in its sales setup. IntegraGen’s US subsidiary in Cambridge will be leveraged to introduce OncoKDM in the US market. OncoDNA’s product is already available in 50 countries and its team of 20 salespeople in Europe and Asia will be able to offer IntegraGen’s services in the future. “This deal will significantly accelerate our time-to-market in a highly acquisitive domain”, says Jean-Pol Detiffe. In June, for instance, Illumina, a multibillion revenue US company selling sequencing equipment, bought Bluebee, a cloud-based software company that enables its users to easily extract insights from genomic data. The cost of genetic sequencing is falling fast, which drives its adoption, a prerequisite for personalized medicine. Among the reasons why Verve Ventures participated in OncoDNA’s series B is the scalability of its business model, the size of the market (Roughly 30% of the USD 100 billion personalized medicine market can be attributed to cancer therapeutics) and the lively M&A activity which make a trade sale to a larger player in the future highly likely.

Jean-Pol Detiffe, who founded and exited DNAVision before founding OncoDNA, has known Bernard Courtieu, the CEO of IntegraGen, since the late 2000s, when they were competitors. They got in touch a few years ago and discussed commercial partnerships first, before eventually deciding that joining forces would be the best thing to do.