A tiny biotech deal announced in July is suddenly attracting a lot of attention. Tempus AI agreed to acquire Personalis, a Merck-backed company which provides advanced genomic sequencing and analytics for cancer treatments, for $1.5 billion. It would have passed by without much notice, but Personalis’ technology is crucial to building the revolutionary personalized cancer therapies announced earlier this week by Merck and Moderna. That makes Personalis’ tech a lot more valuable, and changes the calculus on the deal.
Shares of both Tempus and Personalis were up sharply yesterday (Personalis is up 22% since Tuesday), as investors bet the deal will be renegotiated. But observers and investors tell me that there’s little that Personalis — or Merck, which owns 13% of the company — can do to change the terms. Merck declined to comment.
Merck’s M&A team would be smart to try to pick up Personalis: News of the treatments added tens of billions of dollars to both Merck and Moderna’s market capitalizations, giving them a more potent currency with which to act.
