PRA Health Sciences, a CRO, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Symphony Health Solutions, a privately held best-in-class provider of data, analytics and consulting solutions to the life sciences market. The acquisition reflects PRA’s commitment to a more agile, flexible and adaptive future of clinical development in which technology allows research to integrate seamlessly into patients’ daily lives. It also supports PRA’s commitment to provide deep, data-driven insights to optimize global clinical studies and drug commercialization from concept to compound to cure.

Based in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, Symphony Health is a trusted partner that helps the biopharmaceutical industry grow by connecting and integrating health data and analytics delivered as cloud-based solutions. The company’s Integrated Dataverse, one of the largest commercial health data assets in the U.S., contains information on over 280 million lives, including robust, multi-dimensional real world evidence observations.

Symphony Health is a pioneer in the physician-level targeting environment that biopharmaceutical companies use today to provide strategic market data that analyzes the industry from the perspectives of providers, payers and patients to a variety of private and public organizations. Symphony Health has more than 250 employees and is expected to generate revenues in excess of $200 million in calendar year 2017. Symphony Health serves more than 400 active customers spanning large pharma, biotechnology, government agencies and other sectors.

“We are excited about this new relationship and look forward to helping Symphony Health continue to grow their existing business and working with them to expand geographically using PRA’s global footprint,” said Colin Shannon, PRA’s Chief Executive Officer. “Symphony Health will also provide us with rich data insights that will allow us to customize our clinical studies to be as unique as the patients who they are designed around. By creatively harnessing the power of our technology and data assets, we are redefining the clinical development process for a more patient-centric future.”

With world-wide offices providing services in more than 85 countries, PRA’s strong global presence will support new growth opportunities for Symphony. Neal Bibeau, who will continue to serve as CEO of Symphony Health, said, “This acquisition brings together two fast growing innovation leaders in their respective sectors. PRA and Symphony Health share a passion for using data and analytics to expand the commercial potential of our customer pipelines and to ensure the success of their development and commercialization efforts. Together, we will provide customers with an expanded set of solutions across the product life cycle.”

Led by an experienced industry team, Symphony Health is owned by technology investment firm Symphony Technology Group (STG). “We believe that PRA Health Sciences is an excellent owner for Symphony Health Solutions,” said J.T. Treadwell, managing director at STG and Chairman of Symphony Health. “Both teams have a reputation for fast paced innovation at the intersection of analytics, insights, and value. We have enjoyed working with the terrific Symphony Health team, and we wish them continued success as part of PRA.”

Symphony Health will be acquired for an upfront payment of $530 million in cash payable at closing, subject to customary purchase price adjustments, plus potential contingent payments that are based on Symphony Health exceeding financial targets for the twelve month periods ending December 2017 and December 2018. PRA expects to close the transaction in the third quarter of 2017, subject to regulatory clearances in the United States and other customary closing conditions. The all-cash transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to PRA's adjusted net income per diluted share excluding purchase accounting charges and other one-time transaction costs.