Roche announced in August that it is buying Copenhagen-based Santaris Pharma for $250 million upfront, with another $200 million tied to undisclosed milestones. Through the move, the Basel-based pharma picks up Santaris' locked nucleic acid platform for antisense drug discovery. Roche intends to keep Santaris' Denmark operations open. The acquisition follows two Roche purchases in June: it paid $125 million upfront (another $225 million tied to potential milestones) for the sequencing company Genia Technologies and $725 million in cash plus another $1 billion in potential milestone payments for Seragon Pharmaceuticals, which is focused on oral selective estrogen receptor degraders for breast cancer.