Thermo Fisher agrees to sell microbiology business to Astorg in $1bn deal

Thermo Fisher has agreed to merchantability its microbiology concern successful a woody supra $1bn to backstage equity steadfast Astorg, reflecting the beingness sciences giant’s ongoing pivot distant from successful vitro diagnostics (IVD) towards bolstering its biopharma presence.

Thermo Fisher expects the woody to adjacent successful H2 2026 and intends to supply details connected its interaction to the company’s 2026 outlook during a Q2 net call.

“The transaction reflects our progressive absorption of the institution and provides further superior we tin deploy to make shareholder value,” said Thermo Fisher CEO Marc N. Casper.

Astorg said it would spouse intimately with absorption to further standard the business, aiming to accelerate maturation and heighten operational performance.

Thermo Fisher’s microbiology concern generated $645m successful gross successful 2025 and is portion of the company’s broader speciality diagnostics concern segment. The concern has astir 2,400 employees, alongside 13 manufacturing and R&D sites astir the world.

Despite this steadfast gross generation, Thermo Fisher’s planned divestment of the concern reflects its pivot retired of the IVD space, Dr Andrew S Thompson, manager of therapy probe and investigation successful aesculapian devices for GlobalData told Medical Device Network.

According to Thompson, the IVD abstraction is “volatile”, with microbiology an country of accepted IVD that “may go little applicable arsenic newer technologies regenerate the request to civilization bacteria and viruses for pathological investigations”.

Thompson continued: “There volition ever beryllium a request for notation laboratories, but determination are different techniques, specified arsenic wrong wide spectrometry, that tin regenerate this attack to knowing a microbial phenotype.”

Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) made a akin determination to shrink its diagnostics concern portfolio with the $17.5bn divestment of its Biosciences & Diagnostic Solutions concern to Waters Corporation successful July 2025.

Thermo Fisher’s divestment of its microbiology concern follows its $4.1bn acquisition of Solventum’s purification and filtration portion successful February 2025. Thompson notes that this woody “cemented” the company’s involvement successful biopharma. Thermo Fisher besides acquired objective proceedings services supplier Clario successful an $8.8bn woody successful October 2025.

“Thermo Fisher is positioning itself much into biopharma, apt arsenic a work supplier which, successful a way, fits with its accepted concern model,” Thompson added.

The IVD abstraction besides represents an expanding grade of regulatory challenges, with the European Union’s (EU) successful vitro diagnostics regularisation (IVDR) having a hard clip getting rolled retired successful Europe. According to Thompson, this could correspond different origin successful Thermo Fisher’s determination to merchantability its microbiology business.