Lifecore Biomedical

In 1965, Dr. Otto Sartorius founded a company in Minneapolis called American Medical Research, Inc., initially focused on microbial diagnostic devices. The company went public just three years later in 1968, changing its name to DIAGNOSTIC Inc. A pivotal shift occurred in 1981 when the company began producing sodium hyaluronate, a naturally occurring biopolymer used in everything from cataract surgery to cosmetics. This move into biomaterials proved to be the company's future, leading to another name change in the mid-1980s to Lifecore Biomedical. The company's expertise in hyaluronic acid didn't go unnoticed. In 2008, private equity firm Warburg Pincus acquired the publicly traded Lifecore for about $239 million. Warburg Pincus split the company, keeping the core Hyaluronan Division and selling off the dental business. Just two years later, in 2010, Lifecore was sold again, this time to Landec Corporation, a materials science company looking to expand into biomaterials. For over a decade, Lifecore operated as a division of Landec, becoming a key contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO). Then, in a significant strategic turn, Landec announced in 2022 that it would divest its other businesses and rebrand the entire public company as Lifecore Biomedical. This brought the company full circle, re-emerging as a standalone, publicly traded entity on Nasdaq under the ticker LFCR, focused entirely on the life sciences foundation it had built over decades.