Pharma BD Deal Intelligence
Danaher acquired the Biopharma business of GE Healthcare Life Sciences for $21.4 billion (announced Feb 25, 2019; closed March 31, 2020), the largest acquisition in bioprocessing history. The business was rebranded as Cytiva and became a standalone operating company within Danaher's Life Sciences segment, with ~$3.3 billion in revenue and nearly 7,000 employees at close. To satisfy FTC regulatory conditions, Danaher divested certain affinity/ion-exchange resin, chromatography hardware, biomolecular-characterization and tangential-flow-filtration businesses to Sartorius AG; that sale completed April 30, 2020 for approximately $825 million. The picks-and-shovels thesis has since been validated: in September 2022 Danaher announced merging Cytiva with Pall Corporation's life-sciences business to form a single Biotechnology Group (~$8.5 billion combined revenue, ~$7.5 billion of it bioprocessing), completed in 2023. Cytiva revenue roughly doubled from $3.3 billion to ~$6 billion within a few years of close, and Cytiva tooling now supports the large majority of global monoclonal-antibody manufacturing.