Core laboratories RadPharm and Medifacts International recently merged business operations, hoping to attract new clients with their combined portfolios.

The deal, finalized Feb. 5, creates one company named CoreLab Partners (CoreLabs) with more than 400 employees (320 from RadPharm, 80 from Medifacts) and offices in New Jersey, Maryland, Germany and China. The new company’s main office is in Princeton, N.J.—RadPharm’s current headquarters.

Medifacts president Michael Woehler, Ph.D., is the new president and CEO of CoreLabs. Former RadPharm CEO Ronald Berg will become executive vice president, and all employees of each company will stay on with the CoreLabs.

“There is consolidation going on in the industry,” Woehler said. “We see that our clients—pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, etc.—want to try to deal with less vendors, if you will. We thought this made sense. We can go into these clients, and we can talk about a very broad service offering now—kind of as one-stop shopping.”

Founded in 1985 as a contract research organization (CRO) and cardiovascular core lab, Medifacts filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2007 before selling off the CRO division to focus on its cardiac safety services unit.

Medifacts’ survival post-bankruptcy was made possible by private-equity firms S.V. Sciences and Ampersand Ventures. Ampersand is RadPharm’s majority shareholder, Woehler said, so the companies knew each other well.