DETROIT ? TechTown’s biggest tenant, Asterand, the human tissue business, has reached agreement to be sold to Stemgent, a Massachusetts-based biotech company, for $9 million, the amount that Asterand is in debt.
What is not known is if Asterand will remain at TechTown. But TechTown CEO Leslie Smith is in talks with the company about extending its lease at the incubator, something she hopes to achieve this summer.
Stemgent has been producing products for stem cell research since 2008. As of January 2011, it had more than 40 employees in Massachusetts, San Diego and Scotland.
Last year, Asterand employed about 84 people at TechTown and in Royston, England. The 12-year-old supplier of human tissue samples was once viewed as a promising Detroit start-up firm, earning its first full-year profit in 2008 and posting the London Stock Exchange’s biggest gain that year.
But Asterand ran into financial trouble last year because of debt related to its 2010 acquisition of BioSeek, a San Francisco-based drug discovery services company.
Asterand put itself up for sale in October but could not find a single buyer interested in all of its businesses.
Last year, Asterand’s human tissue business had an operating loss of $5.1 million and revenues of $15.5 million.
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