Invitae closes $1.4B acquisition of Boulder’s ArcherDX

BOULDER and SAN FRANCISCO — Genetics tester Invitae Corp. (NYSE: NVTA) closed on its $1.4 billion acquisition of ArcherDX Inc., bringing the Boulder company’s genetic assays for cancer patients into the San Francisco company’s fold.

In a statement Monday, Invitae said it will pay $325 million in cash and up to 30 million shares to ArcherDX’s investors, along with 27 million additional shares linked to future milestones.

ArcherDX CEO Jason Myers will remain as the business head and will join Invitae’s board.

“With the addition of ArcherDX’s technologies, capabilities and team, Invitae is now well positioned to accelerate the utilization of genetic information throughout a cancer patient’s journey,” Invitae CEO Sean George said in a statement.

Invitae and ArcherDX are in the same subset of the medical technology industry, developing genomic toolkits to determine if patients would respond better to certain types of treatments versus others. ArcherDX’s platform specifically focused on cancers and the growing group of drugs that aim to turn off genetic markers thought to fuel cancer growth once mutated.

ArcherDX originally planned to go public, filing for an initial public offering of $100 million in early June before abandoning that effort for the Invitae offer less than a month later. The company believed it could corner a cut of the $45 billion oncology testing market with its PCM and Stratafide platforms.

In an interview with BizWest at the time, Myers said ArcherDX’s technology will be easier for patients to access through Invitae’s distribution platform rather than through ArcherDX as a smaller standalone firm.

Biodesix Inc., a Boulder company that makes genetic tests for lung cancer patients, filed preliminary documents to go public last week. It did not specify the amount of money it hopes to raise, or when it hopes to debut on the Nasdaq Global Market.

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