Omega Diagnostics, the AIM-listed medical diagnostics company, announced its intention to enter the allergy diagnostic market through the acquisition of the IVD business of German allergy specialist Allergopharma Joachim Ganzer KG (a unit of Merck KGgA), for a consideration of €6million. Allergopharma's IVD business sells manual allergy diagnostic test kits primarily in the German market.

Omega plans to develop a line up of automated diagnostic tests for the clinical allergy market by way of an exclusive licensing agreement with Immunodiagnostic Systems (IDH) to develop high throughput clinical allergy assays for its IDS-iSYS automatic diagnostic platform. In addition, Omega's semi-automatic Genarryt microarray platform will be fully automated for allergy screening tests. Omega intends to use its extensive distributor network to drive allergy product sales in strategic global markets outside of Germany, where Allergopharma currently has 97% of its sales.

To finance the acquisition and automation strategy, the company is placing 64,583,350 new shares to raise £7.75 million at 12p per share subject to shareholder approval at a general meeting on December 17th, 2010.

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