NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – BioMérieux said today that its first quarter revenues rose 3 percent year over year, driven by an intense flu season and growth in the Asia Pacific region.
BioMérieux also announced today that it has submitted a 510(k) application to the US Food and Drug Administration for its BioFire FilmArray Pneumonia Panel.
For the three months ended March 31, the company reported revenues of €587 million ($726.6 million), up from €568 million in the prior-year period. At a constant exchange rates and scope of consolidation, revenues grew 13 percent year over year.
Revenues for the clinical applications business, which includes microbiology, molecular biology, and immunoassays, rose 4 percent to €486.3 million from €460.7 million in Q1 2017.
Microbiology, the largest segment within clinical applications, declined 3 percent to €222.7 million from €229.2 million in Q1 2017. BioMérieux attributed its microbiology results to robust sales in all regions of the BacT/Alert blood culture line, as well as an increase in sales of reagents for its Vitek automated identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing system, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.
Molecular biology revenues increased 25 percent to €148.2 million from €118.6 million in the prior-year period. The firm noted that an intense flu season fueled "impressive performance" from the BioFire FilmArray line during the quarter, which grew around 30 percent to more than €130 million in sales, up from €100 million.
Also within clinical applications, immunoassays contributed €107.9 million in Q1, down 3 percent from €111.7 million in Q1 2017. The firm said that the decrease in sales of high medical value markers in Asia-Pacific offset price pressure on procalcitonin tests in the US, where volumes "nevertheless remained on an upward trend."
Industrial applications revenues in Q1 grew a fraction of 1 percent to €100.8 million from €100.3 million in Q1 2017, due in part to an increase in sales of microbiology products to pharmaceutical clients and molecular biology products for food applications.
From a regional perspective, BioMérieux sales in the Americas were up 1 percent to €270.6 million from €267.5 million year over year. In Europe, sales were up 2 percent to €222.1 million from €216.9 million, and in Asia-Pacific sales were up 15 percent to €94.2 million from €81.6 million.
In the quarter, BioMérieux acquired Astute Medical, the developer of an FDA-cleared assay for protein biomarkers of kidney injury, for $90 million. The firm also announced it has submitted its FilmArray Pneumonia Panel for the detection lower respiratory infections to the FDA. The panel detects 33 targets in sputum and bronchoalveolar lavage samples, including 18 bacteria, 8 viruses and 7 antibiotic resistance genes, and also provides abundance measures for 15 of the bacterial targets. The panel is compatible with all existing instruments, including the FilmArray 1.5, FilmArray 2.0, and the high throughput FilmArray Torch, the firm said.