New Delhi: Swiss drugmaker Novartis said on Saturday it had received a binding offer from Germany’s Siemens Healthineers to acquire its molecular imaging business for Fluorine-18 positron emission tomography, or PET scans.
The German health technology company will pay more than 200 million euros ($224 million) to acquire the diagnostic arm of Advanced Accelerator Applications, owned by Novartis, the Financial Times reported earlier on Saturday.
In a statement sent to Reuters, Novartis did not confirm the value of the deal but said Siemens Healthineers would remain a partner in the Novartis radioligand therapy (RLT) business, adding that it expects the transaction to close in the fourth quarter.
Advanced Accelerator Applications and Siemens Healthineers did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours.
In 2017, Novartis bought France’s Advanced Accelerator Applications for $3.9 billion to build out Novartis’s arsenal of medicines to target cancer using radioactive substance.
According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, Fluorine-18 is a radioactive substance that is being studied in PET imaging to diagnose cancer and find out how well some cancers respond to treatment.
(Reporting by Gursimran Kaur and Oliver Hirt; Editing by Jan Harvey, Giles Elgood and Helen Popper)
