Investment firm Nautic Partners has purchased the CRO Omnicare Clinical Research (CR) from its parent company Omnicare Inc., a publicly traded company that focuses primarily on providing pharmaceuticals and ancillary services to long-term care institutions.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
James Pusey, CEO of Omnicare CR since September 2009, said extricating the 900-employee CRO from the corporate structure of a large publicly traded company not focused on research will allow Omnicare CR to be far more agile in growing and changing to meet demands in the clinical research industry. The CRO will announce a name change later this year, he said, adding that there will be no layoffs. Instead, the company will now go into hiring mode, he said.
Pusey said Providence, R.I.-based Nautic, one of the early investors in CRO Parexel, is now majority stakeholder in Omnicare CR, but that the CRO’s leadership team also acquired a large share of the company. Omnicare CR has been preparing to be spun off from the larger Omnicare parent since the third quarter of 2010, when the parent company announced it wanted to reallocate its investment costs, said Pusey.
Omnicare CR—which Pusey said is debt-free and brings in $100 million in annual revenue and currently boasts $160 million in backlog—was founded in 1985 as Biopharm. Along two other small CROs, it was bought by Covington, KY-based Omnicare in the late 1990s.
