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OrganOx, an Oxford university spinout that enables donor organs to be kept healthy outside the body before transplantation, has been sold to Terumo Corporation, a Japanese medical technology company, for $1.5bn.
The deal announced on Monday is the largest acquisition of any UK university spinout so far, said Oxford vice-chancellor Irene Tracey. It follows the sale of the university’s quantum computing start-up Oxford Ionics to US group IonQ in June for $1.1bn.
The sales come as many fast-growing UK companies have struggled to find large domestic investors to fuel their ambitions and have shunned the London stock exchange as a potential source of funding, fuelling anxiety about the health of the country’s capital markets.
OrganOx was founded by professors Constantin Coussios and Peter Friend in 2008 to keep removed organs functioning for longer than traditional methods, by circulating warm oxygen-rich fluid through them to replicate conditions inside the body.
This “perfusion” technology gives clinicians more time to assess the organ’s condition and transport it to a distant hospital for transplantation.
OrganOx’s perfusion machine has been used in more than 6,000 liver transplants worldwide, and it expects to launch a similar device for kidneys in 2030. In 2024, the company made an operating profit of £7.2mn on sales of £55mn.
Friend said the sale to Terumo, a much larger medtech company with global infrastructure, would accelerate the global adoption of its transplantation technology. OrganOx will become a wholly owned division of Terumo based in Oxford.
BGF, one of the UK’s biggest start-up investors, is the largest shareholder in OrganOx, followed by Lauxera Capital Partners, a Paris-based healthcare specialist fund. The company has had several funding rounds, most recently raising $142mn in February.
BGF said on Monday that the OrganOx sale was the fund’s largest ever return on an investment, generating £175mn in proceeds.
Other investors include Sofina, Soleus Capital, Avidity Partners, Technikos, Longwall Ventures, the University of Oxford and the Oxford Technology and Innovations Fund. The size of their holdings was not disclosed.
Friend said he had asked himself whether it was right to sell the fast-growing start-up to a non-UK owner.
“But I feel that there are substantial advantages in joining a global organisation that did not have its own transplantation business,” he said. “The most important thing is that the highly skilled work in continuing to develop our technology will remain in Oxford.”
Tracey, who co-authored an independent review of university spinouts for the government in 2023, agreed that the sale to Terumo was the best outcome for OrganOx and the transplant patients who would benefit from its technology. The university would benefit too by ploughing its undisclosed share of the proceeds back into research.
But she added: “The big challenge is to grow these companies ourselves in the UK, with investors bold enough to put sufficient capital into them. I think we can achieve that in the short to medium term.”
Terumo shares closed down 4 per cent in Tokyo.