SeraCare Life Sciences, Inc. Sells Biostorage Business, Restructures Biz Around Diagnostics

Less than a year after it was acquired by a Chicago-based private equity firm, SeraCare Life Sciences in Milford announced the sale of its biorepository, biobanking and laboratory services business, a new team of executives and a new corporate structure. Charlie Mamrak, a former operating partner at Linden Capital Partners who joined the company as CEO in April 2012 shortly after Linden bought the company, told Mass High Tech that the goal of the changes announced late Thursday is a renewed focus on its in vitro diagnostics (IVD) - technology for tests to be marketed to hospitals and doctors. “What we’ve done is refocus on the previous core of the business, which is to provide innovative products to the in vitro diagnostics market,” he said. Terms of the sale of biorepository assets and employees to Maryland-based Precision Health Holdings Inc. were not disclosed. Mamrak said the business - which involved storing samples, such as blood and tissues, for use in clinical research - was a small part of SeraCare’s overall business. The company has 150 employees after the sale, who are now organized into three new business units: IVD Research, IVD Processing and clinical laboratory. Mamrak said all three units are of about equal size - within 10 percent of each other - but that the potential for growth lies mostly in the research unit. “There’s just so much activity in that market right now,” he said.