LabCorp is strengthening its position in autoimmune testing. To do this, the Burlington, NC-based company is acquiring Myriad Genetics’s autoimmune business unit, which includes the Vectra rheumatoid arthritis (RA) assay, for $150 million.

The deal is expected to close in 3Q21.

Vectra is a non-invasive, blood-based test that analyzes 12 biomarkers to measure RA disease activity. It combines those measures to generate an easy-to-understand score, which indicates the severity of RA inflammation and how well current treatments are working. It also can predict potential, future joint damage.

“LabCorp has consistently been a major player in rheumatology and continues to focus on providing medical professionals with the data they need to best treat their RA patients,” said Brian Caveney, MD, CMO, and president of LabCorp Diagnostics. “The addition of the Vectra testing capabilities to our in-house products offers tremendous potential for us to expand the test’s availability and make LabCorp a single-source diagnostics solution for RA providers. 

The deal follows closely behind Myriad selling the Myriad myPath Melanoma laboratory test to Castle Biosciences for $32.5 million.

And speaking of deals, LabCorp’s Executive VP and CFO, Glenn Eisenberg said during a recent earnings call that more M&A could be on the way.

“We've said in our guidance overall is that the free cash flow that we're going to generate this year, call it, the $1.8 billion to $2 billion, we expect to deploy between M&A and share repurchases,” Eisenberg said according to The Motely Fool’s transcript of the earnings call. “We tend to start off slower in the first quarter, just historically, even with our buyback program just to let the year a little bit unfold and see what the M&A opportunities are there. We continue, to have really a strong pipeline of M&A transactions.”