Johnson & Johnson Nordic AB acquires Åmic

Johnson & Johnson Nordic AB has announced the acquisition of Åmic, a privately-held Swedish developer of in vitro diagnostic (IVD) technologies for use in Point-of-Care (POC) and near-patient settings (outside the physical facilities of the clinical laboratory). Johnson & Johnson Nordic AB is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Based in Sollentuna, Sweden, Johnson & Johnson Nordic AB is a sales and marketing company in the medical devices and diagnostics segment.

The acquisition will provide Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company, with access to a high performance technology platform – currently in development in this rapidly growing area of diagnostics – that complements its clinical laboratory, immunohematology and donor screening businesses.  Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, delivers high quality in vitro diagnostic products that give health care professionals around the world the knowledge they need to make better treatment decisions sooner.

Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics serves the global transfusion medicine community with donor screening and blood typing products to help ensure every patient receives blood that's safe, the right type, and the right unit. It also provides sophisticated information management, testing technologies, automation and interpretation tools to clinical laboratories worldwide to help them run more efficiently and improve patient care.

As a result of the acquisition, Johnson & Johnson expects to incur an estimated one-time after-tax charge of approximately $40 million during the second quarter of 2008 related to the expensing of in-process research and development. Other terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Åmic is developing technology that uses a chip-based micro-fluidic platform to enable fully quantitative, immunoassay tests in POC or near-patient settings. This next-generation technology represents an advance in an area of diagnostics where double-digit market growth is anticipated.

"This acquisition is a strategic opportunity to develop a Point-of-Care channel," said Mark Straley, Worldwide Commercial President, Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, Inc. "We're committed to bringing novel assays and existing tests closer to the patient and delivering information to health care professionals when and where they need it."

"We're excited about the possibilities of touching the lives of patients by combining our testing technologies with current and future assays of Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics," said Ove Öhman, founder and CEO, Åmic.