Cook Medical today announced that it signed a letter of intent to sell its Reproductive Health business (Cook ART) to a private equity firm.
The Bloomington, Indiana-based company entered into the agreement with Astorg, a firm with healthcare investment experience. Its sale includes the company’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) and assisted reproductive technology (ART) products.
Cook Medical entered into this agreement nearly one year after a previous attempt to sell off these businesses fell through. In February 2022, the company signed a letter of intent to sell its Reproductive Health business to CooperCompanies for $875 million. However, last August, Cooper abandoned the deal amid FTC scrutiny.
Astorg intends to acquire and simultaneously combine the Cook ART portfolio with Hamilton Thorne, a provider of precision instruments, consumables, software and services to the ART research and the cell biology space. The firm says this combination should create a leading ART provider.
Cook Medical expects the transaction to close this fall. It plans for the 93 commercial employees in Reproductive Health to receive employment offers or automatically transfer to the newly combined company after closing. The deal also includes the Cook Vandergrift, Pennsylvania manufacturing site. Cook plans to continue providing services there over a three-year transition period. After that, the 209 employees at Vandergrift will join the combined company.
Proceeds from the sale — which were not disclosed — will be reinvested back into Cook Medical’s strategic plan, the company said.
“Cook is focused on our vision to deliver a continuous stream of innovative new products and services to address unmet customer needs. Part of achieving that business strategy has included reviewing our product portfolio and identifying what product lines are the best fit for Cook moving forward and which might have more opportunity to grow or thrive elsewhere,” said DJ Sirota, SVP of Cook Medical’s MedSurg division. “Astorg has exciting plans to build an IVF/ART manufacturing hub at our facility in Vandergrift, PA, creating a core location for manufacturing operations for Cook ART products. The expertise and skill of our Reproductive Health commercial and manufacturing teams will be critical to this transaction, which reflects the value our employees have to this business, its customers, and patients around the world.”
