Founded in 1978, CMA-Medina was until now in the hands of Straco, the investment vehicle of De Raedt and Verheyden. The lab group employs around 800 people and operates 8 labs in Flanders. Together with Biogroup founder and clinical biologist Stéphane Eimer, the business family will hold the majority of the shares in Biogroup.  

Like CMA-Medina, the French group offers routine and specialized analyses for clinical biology across France: from its home base in the ‘Grand Est’ (Alsace and Burgundy) to Greater Paris, the southeast of France and Corsica. In France, Biogroup is already the largest player in a market with an annual turnover of EUR 6 billion. In 2018, the group achieved a turnover of EUR 600 million. By means of comparison: in Belgium, of which Flanders is the northern region, CMA-Medina is the main leader in a market worth over EUR 1 billion.  

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Flanders-based CMA-Medina labs have been operating at full capacity. “We carry out both PCR tests and serological tests to determine whether people have produced COVID-19 antibodies,” De Quinnemar explains. “It goes without saying that, in doing so, we have generated additional turnover. However, this situation has also put a lot of pressure on our organization, because we had to recruit and train more people and because we need to respect tight deadlines when it comes to processing COVID-19 analyses.”  

In addition to blood analyses, CMA-Medina specializes in pathology analyses (skin disorders), toxicology, preventive medicine and veterinary medicine. As such, CMA-Medina can perform a total of over 1,000 different tests.