Fluidigm said on Wednesday that it has completed the acquisition of InstruNor, a privately held, Oslo-based provider of integrated sample preparation systems for flow and mass cytometry.

Fluidigm purchased all outstanding shares of InstruNor for approximately $7.2 million, including $5.2 million in cash and approximately $2 million in stock.

InstruNor will become a part of Fluidigm's mass cytometry business, and Fluidigm said it expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings in 2021.

"High-parameter mass cytometry is increasingly being applied to disease and therapy research with more than 1,000 publications, an increase of more than 55 percent since the end of 2018," Fluidigm President and CEO Chris Linthwaite said in a statement. "Researchers using mass cytometry on larger sample sets require robust, reproducible, and high-quality sample preparation support matched to their throughput requirements." 

Linthwaite added that InstruNor will support Fluidigm's entry into the sample prep market for cytometry analysis, and will allow it to offer more complete and high-throughput workflows for pharma-biotech, contract research organizations, and academic medical research customers.

"With InstruNor's technology, we will be able to expand our capabilities to include fully automated, walkaway sample preparation for flow and mass cytometry," Linthwaite said. 

The InstruNor system is being used at 10 customer sites across Fluidigm's global geographic regions. Fluidigm said that it will commercially launch the platform in the second quarter of this year.