LDC has acquired Fishawack Group, a provider of communications services to pharmaceutical companies, from Growth Capital Partners (GCP) in a £38m (€44.3m) tertiary buyout.

GCP acquired the company in 2013 in a £13m secondary buyout from YFM Equity Partners. YFM first backed the company in 2008 and made a 2x money return from the sale to GCP.
Fishawack is headquartered in Knutsford in Cheshire and was founded by Oliver Dennis and Dominic Miller, who continue to run the company.

The business provides medical communications, market access and pharmacovigilance services to help clients commercialise drug compounds. Its services are typically provided from the phase II/III clinical trial stage through to post-approval and last for the full lifecycle of the patents on compounds.

The company employs 230 staff and runs three sites in the UK, two in the US and one in Switzerland. It is contracted with 15 of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies, including GSK, Sanofi and Novartis.

Following the deal LDC’s Jonathan Bell and Simon Braham, who led the investment for the firm, will join the Fishawack board as non-executive directors.

LDC believes Fishawack is well-positioned to benefit from increasingly complex drug research, efficacy and safety requirements. LDC estimates that the medical affairs industry is valued at £6bn. Around half of this is outsourced.

The Fishawack deal is the fifth for LDC’s Manchester office during the last eight months. The team has invested £100m of equity and secured £275m worth of exits.

LDC has been an active investor in the pharmaceuticals and medical affairs industry. The firm recently backed pharmaceutical components manufacturer ChargePoint and sold Synexus, a clinical trials patient recruitment firm.

Other private equity firms have also secured good returns from investments in pharmaceuticals and medical affairs in recent years.

Synova Capital made 16x money from the sale of  Kinapse, a company providing regulatory and compliance outsourcing services to the pharmaceuticals industry, to HgCapital in 2016. In 2015 CBPE Capital banked 22x money from the sale of pharmaceuticals supplier IDIS.