Stake in drug-testing contractor purchased in $3 billion-plus deal

NEW YORK In a deal worth a reported $3 billion-plus, One Equity Partners’ stake in drug trial manager Quintiles Translational is being sold to its chief executive and other buyout firms, including Bain Capital and TPG Capital, according to The New York Times.

Dennis Gillings, founder of Quintiles and its chief executive officer and chairman, has teamed up with Bain and TPG to take control of the stake from One Equity, the private equity arm of JPMorgan Chase, which also sponsored the company’s $1.7 billion buyout in 2003.

Gillings had previously offered to buy the company in 2002 for $1.3 billion, but that number was rejected as being too low.

Quintiles, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., has more than 19,000 employees. At the time of its founding in 1982, Gillings was a professor of biostatistics at the University of North Carolina. The company went public in 1994.