Which will be highly attractive. Biopharmaceutical development did 17% growth in the quarter. This is where we do protein analytics to support clinical trials and is essentially an engineering tool for bioprocessing design. That was probably a little bit inflated in the quarter. The 6.4% we have done for the full year is probably maybe a little bit lower than our aspiration, but the big delta between the first and second quarter was just kind of negotiating this tariff position. We make those products primarily in Sweden and having those shipped into the U.S. and going through all the tariff machinations for how that would be processed kind of caused a little bit of a blip at the very end of the first quarter that fell into the second quarter. We are hoping to see that momentum kind of return towards the back half of the year.
Of course, the leading indicator there for us is clinical trial starts, which have been essentially flat. If we see those things start to pick up, we expect to be in a position to continue to gain share on that core indicator. Clinical genomics was also a bit of a disappointment from when we entered the year, but I would say that's a tale of geography. We have been doing double-digit growth in North America, Europe, or essentially anywhere outside of China, which has been probably above expectations. With all the global political tensions and the ramifications of that, we're doing like a minus 60% in China, and that's obviously driven the business down to a negative. Overall, I think the quarter was around 5%, the year closer to 4%, and I think we hope to expect to see progress on that.
Obviously, when we lap the China headwind, which is probably two or three points overall, we get back to something that we think is a pretty attractive underlying growth rate.
Okay. Maybe just to pick up there on clinical genomics, setting aside the China piece you talked about, kind of double-digit growth in Europe and North America, kind of ex-China. I mean, I think historically you've talked about that business over the long term being more mid-single digit type growth. Can you help bridge us kind of the long term mid-single and the double digit you're doing? Is it product cadence, share gains, what's kind of underpinning that momentum?
Yeah. I think as the clinical genomics market returns, we are primarily an LDT provider in the U.S. What we're seeing is an increase in the ability or the desire for formerly PCR tests, which might have three or four markers, to be a little bit more sophisticated. Right around that point, you start to switch over where PCR no longer becomes a viable option either from a workflow perspective. A great example of that is in for pemetrexed, which is the primary chemotherapy drug. That used to be a four or five marker panel that was validated by the AMP guidelines, right? AMP recently updated their guidelines to being eight in tier one, six in tier two if initial three markers were considered. The kind of things that we're able to do now as the market's matured is we just release a full 17 marker panel.
No incremental cost from our perspective, but now essentially you're essentially future-proofing, and that's going in and getting a lot of traction in the market. We hope as CPIC continues to update their dosing guidelines based off of those markers, that we'll see continued adoption from the oncologists. Of course, NCCN has moved it from a marker to be considered to a marker to be explicitly recommended. All these things kind of build on each other where you really see that the maturation of our understanding of the science now is really starting to drive a little bit more sophistication. As you cross a certain barrier with PCR, you kind of fall right into our wheelhouse for one of the only real solutions that can address those kinds of situations.
Okay. On calibration solutions, you talked about kind of 10% plus growth there as well. I think you guys noted some pricing benefit there. Maybe just unpack kind of what's pricing been and underlying volumes. I think you also talked about recouping some share both in the North America market, but also internationally. Maybe just remind us where that is and who that's from. I assume it's more kind of regional players, but a little more color on the share recapture as well.
Yeah. What we do across calibration solutions is we help to monitor the environment that a lot of biologics survive in. Temperature, humidity, other environmental factors, and we help to ensure the integrity of those products and the integrity of those environmental spaces. We also have some tools that work specifically in certain diagnostic cases. One of the product categories is doing the same kind of parameters, but applied to dialysis machines. We validate that dialysis machines will indeed clean your blood. That's kind of been the legacy of the business, and we've continued to pick up share or regain share in that market where we have a very high global market share. Overall, I would say pricing for us across the board has been relatively steady throughout a high inflationary period. We've always been slightly creative on pricing.
I don't believe that that has kind of skyrocketed with inflation because we're primarily a consumable type business. You find that consumables haven't kind of achieved the same pricing power that instrumentation did during the supply chain crisis and other things. We continue to be a couple points maybe creative on price. The primary pickup has been volume, and that's been volume across a couple product categories, both renal and then this kind of ongoing monitoring of biologics as they're in the field.
On BPD, you talked a little bit about some of the dynamics here and just in the quarter, right? Just year to date, talk about what you're seeing in terms of demand both on the instrument side and consumables. I think, like you said, a lot's tied to clinical trials. Those have been kind of flattish, so not going down, but also not massively reaccelerating. Just maybe talk about what you're seeing between those two buckets. Maybe, John, I think you guys talked about some mixed dynamics on the margin side, first half to second half. If you can maybe just help us remind us kind of the benefit you'll see in the back half as mix shifts back a bit.
Yeah. So overall, we really start at clinical trials. One, kind of the lead application that we have is PK/PD studies, which is essentially first in human. Where does the drug go when you put it in a human being? How much do I need to work on dosing to get the effect that I want? How does it get metabolized? What happens to it after the fact? That's really kind of where we have a lot of concentration and what is a high-throughput single-plex ELISA, which explicitly goes at answering the questions that the FDA is asking as you put drugs in the clinical trial. We've been picking up share versus manual tests, which are kind of the standard or slightly automated tests for a long period of time.
Given the high-quality regulatory barriers to working in clinical trials, right, we expect to kind of see that pick up over time anyway. Clinical trials to us, an increase in clinical trials should do nothing but add to that long-term growth rate.
Yeah. From a margin perspective, this business is about 75% protein analytics and 25% peptides. We've had really strong growth in peptides, north of 40% over the first half of the year. Comes at a lower margin in the high 40s. We expect that business to move back the mix towards the amino acid peptide, I'm sorry, protein detection, which has gross margins closer in the mid-60s. We would expect gross margin from high 50s moving into the back, probably low 60s in the back half.
Okay. That's helpful. On FCC, you talked about in the opening about some of the challenges in the quarter, but you also talked about reinvesting, I think, $900,000 back into that business. Maybe talk about where those dollars are going and how we should think about kind of the return on those dollars. I think along with that, you also took some cost reductions. Maybe just level set us. I think it was like $3 million on cost reductions, net the reinvestment, are we talking kind of $2 million annualized savings by 2027. Is that the right way to frame it?
Yeah, that's correct. Clearly, as we entered the year, there's been a lot of changes, right? Both tariffs and in currency changes. As we looked at what tariffs, currencies, and then across the dynamics and diagnostics in China, we needed to kind of readjust where our investment profile was exposed. To do that, we primarily had some cost reductions that associate with our clinical genomics business. We took that chance to operate as one team. We view every action, every initiative as another experiment, right? There is nothing that is permanent within our universe. We looked at those experiments that were working, those experiments that were working, and went through a readjustment process. That enabled us to take around $3 million worth of cost out, which we felt was appropriate.
We feel like we were fully adjusted to the tariff environment, the currency environment, and whatever may come. To have an opportunity to reinvest in SDC to accelerate that long-term growth profile. Those primary investments in SDC will be around commercialization. How are we addressing the market to expand our footprint both with the current last acquisition of GKE and chemical indicators, as well as our life science-focused business within sterility.
Okay. Maybe just one more on SDC. You talked about the fulfillment challenges in the quarter. Maybe just remind us kind of what's driving that and then the timeline to rectify that. I mean, is there a chance those shift to orders and come back in the back half of the year? How do we think about the fulfillment issue today and maybe how that unwinds on the other side?
Yeah. Our sterility testing, the product itself is actually an active biologic. We use genetically pure bacteria that are designed to survive in these, obviously, the strain environment of being sterilized. Think like subsea volcano bacteria, and we're going to steam sterilize those. If you kill those, you can be sure that everything else is dead. What we're doing is we're growing essentially this bacteria. We're ensuring that they are genetically pure. We're putting them in their spore state. We're depositing them. We're providing growth media, all these other things. We have all the challenges of any other biomanufacturing process. Right now, what we're having is a little bit of challenge, right? One of those product lines that we're working through systematically to improve the yield on those products.
We expect that to improve here in the back half of the year, and that will have some positive adjustments in terms of sequential growth towards the back half of the year.
Okay. Maybe on the CapEx side, I think mix shift the portfolio the last few years to be more OpEx than CapEx at your customers, but still some exposure there. I think larger tools peers have talked about a bit of a shift in tone around pharma, biopharma, CapEx spending. To the extent you do touch that with some of your portfolio, have you kind of seen that thawing as well? Maybe just kind of latest updates on the CapEx biopharma spending environment into the back half of or the end of the calendar year and then into 2026 as well.
Sure. We have two divisions, clinical genomics and biopharmaceutical development, which are both razor razor blade models, right? We place equipment, and then you have dedicated consumables that can only work on our equipment that go in. Clinical genomics is obviously in one space, and biopharma is focused on the biopharma question that you're asking. Right now, we don't feel like we've seen constraints in biopharma capital equipment. If you went back to 2023, right, when there was a massive reset of the biopharmaceutical portfolio, we had a pretty significant dip. We felt that right away as they kind of froze their decisions. Clinical trial starts really, I think, crashed on the order of 15%. Instantly last year, we came right out of that, and we grew significantly.
We don't feel like there's a real capital constraint in our section of the biopharmaceutical market today. Obviously, we also have some aspects of peptide synthesis that we talked about earlier. Given everything going on with GLP-1s and metabolomic hormones and other things, which are essentially peptides, there's a tremendous amount of interest and work there unconstrained by our capital equipment trends.
Maybe just remind us in terms of the mixer you talked about, kind of trial starts earlier stage, right? I mean, if biotech funding does continue to improve like we saw kind of in September and October, I mean, would that start to show up pretty quickly in starts that you'd benefit, or is it kind of, should we think more quarters in terms of the lag if that biotech funding continues along?
Yeah, I would think quarters, right? We're not early stage R&D. In as much as companies that are gaining venture-level funding, that really wouldn't impact us. A lot of the companies that are public that might be getting follow-on funding and able to accelerate in their clinical trials, that would obviously be a benefit to us. I think our exposure, though, to biotechs is probably highly concentrated within the biopharmaceutical development division. It might be on the order of 15%-20% of that division's potential. We're primarily focused on larger companies who are the primary drivers, primarily concentrated on MABs and other protein-based technologies or antibody drug conjugates and a number of other things that are typically led by large pharma as opposed to small pharma.
Okay. Shifting gears over to capital allocation. You've done a nice job bringing leverage down. I think you at the quarter about three times leverage today. Maybe just talk about appetite to do deals and then also kind of what you're seeing out there from a seller perspective. Are things shaking loose a little bit more? Is there still maybe a valuation disconnect? Maybe that'll always exist from your view, but just what are you seeing kind of in terms of the M&A landscape and kind of your appetite as the leverage comes down here?
Yeah, sure. We acquired a company about a year and a half ago that we had been courting for on the order of a decade, GKE, a sterility space. To do that, we spiked our debt levels up to 3.8, 3.9 turns, and we subsequently have paid that down to three. We believe that the market kind of reference point today is probably really around two and a half. What used to be a three and a half, four had a lot of comfort for the audience today. Typically, the audience would tell us that two and a half is probably closer to a standard. We will be concentrating on driving that down towards two and a half. That said, we will not pass on highly creative, right, value-added bolt-ons in the space. I think we have shown that we can handle operationally a higher debt load.
It's just less comfortable maybe for the investors. From an M&A standpoint, to a large extent, right, you can see that there's been a huge reallocation away from small caps into the large caps and the diversified tool space. We traded at a meaningful discount, I would say, to companies like Danaher or Thermo Fisher, the big people who are broader tools players. That kind of trend line continues down to where we would look at typical M&A opportunities. That has obviously been very discouraging from our traditional pool of entrepreneur exits or other people who are innovating the space to desire to exit. That said, we continue to have those conversations, but I would say that the M&A market today is a little bit more quiet.
I think once the broader market starts to rebalance a little bit, right, where those valuations close, then I think it'll make a little bit more sense for everybody or for the entrepreneurs to have a desire to exit and for us from a cost of capital standpoint to make those exits work.
Okay. On GKE, I think last year tracked ahead of your deal model. It's now folded into the core business. Maybe just an update kind of as that continue to track in line or better than plans. Anything else to add on GKE?
Yeah. I think we talked about our sterility testing historically has been using biologics. There's another way to use inorganic chemistry to do a chemical indicator. Those are complementary aspects of the same workflow of validating a sterility cycle. GKE, we believe to be the technology innovator and leader in chemical indicators. Now we have a chance to cross-sell those into the same cycles and the same workflows, as well as expand our footprint to better serve the healthcare market, which is another big market for sterility testing. That has gone really well. If you think about who we are as a team, we tend to buy or acquire technology that has breakthrough in these highly regulated markets because even creating a better mousetrap and then gaining commercial traction, right, can be a matter of like a decade from an innovation standpoint.
Often those people struggle with globalizing and commercializing those things. That is really kind of our strength. We have seen that kind of thesis play out with GKE, where commercial leverage expansion, being more focused on how to engage with customers, how to have the right kind of marketing support, how to have the right kind of sales training, how to have the right targeting and engagement with customers, is really a benefit to them and why that has kind of continued to outperform our deal model.
That's good to hear. You also noted on coming on 2Q some expansion in APAC. Maybe just refresh us in terms of the plan there, where you're hiring, how many folks you're hiring, and then how to think about the return on adding some commercial assets there in APAC.
Yeah. Within that restructuring, obviously, when you see a dollar number, which probably you guys care about most, within that, there's a lot of movement, right? What you saw in Asia-Pacific, for example, was a very severe contraction in the operating expenses associated with China clinical genomics specifically. What you did see is that also that we're able to redeploy that both within China and across the broader Asia-Pacific region to a certain extent. Within China, you're seeing a lot of traction from local biotechs in terms of outlicensing, stock appreciation, and a lot of growth. As they do outlicensing, you're seeing them have a desire to meet global quality standards. That is causing them to change the regime for how they're conducting their clinical trials, which kind of now makes it a lot more attractive.
We're reinvesting in that clinical trial support and penetrating China specifically. We're also putting in more dedicated support into Korea and Indonesia and then expanding certain footprints in the healthcare sector, which has been unaffected. Again, within that "$2 million of cost reduction," there was probably really three and then some reallocation within it to continue to accelerate growth based off where the opportunities are.
Are these markets you did not serve directly before, or were they through distributors?
Yeah. Some of this is like distributors there. Now that we actually understand what do we need out of a distributor, what kind of technical support requirements do they need to focus on? Where are we calling, and are they calling on the right people, and do they have the right footprint? What's the breadth of their bag? Do they have the right to call these people? We're improving that throughout. Providing some of this local technical support is really the breakthrough, right? Often what happens in quality control is you're really getting in contact and getting in front of people is the first thing. Typically, we have relatively unique offerings that are highly differentiated, and what you need to do is help people to understand how to appreciate that and how to apply that.
Once we do that, you get a customer for life. Sterility testing, typically what happens is you get specced into a new drug. Then once you get specced into a new drug, two or three years later, when it's approved, you get a 20-year annuity on the back end. This kind of formula of high technical support, which is highly differentiated versus our competitors, and providing that is really a great leading indicator for long-term health. It does kind of come in waves, similar to selling a life insurance product or something like that, right? You do a lot of work today. It's not a short-term payout, but the long-term payout is absolutely phenomenal.
Okay. You guys do not formally guide, but you did say as part of the 2Q release that you expected revenues up sequentially in 3Q. Maybe just remind us, is that some of the timing aspects we talked about earlier, kind of what gives you the confidence, visibility to make that note on the sequential improvement, given normally you guys do not formally.
Yeah, yeah. We're taking baby steps. Normally our businesses are reasonably flat throughout the year, right? We might see a little bit more in the fourth and first quarter of the year. Our haves tend to be a little bit more balanced. We're expecting to see some acceleration sequentially in the back half of the year versus the first half of the year. Some of that, as you mentioned, is kind of working through some of these production challenges in SDC because the underlying backlog has grown in that period. We're seeing what feels like decent momentum in our early stage funnels and some of our activities and sales wins that will pay off in the back half of the year. For us, I think we expect the back half to be incrementally better than the first half.
Hopefully, obviously, everyone's hoping that 2026 starts to look incrementally better, if not kind of back to go-go life science tools days as it was maybe in 2017, 2018, or whatever.
All right. Great. With that, I think we'll leave it there. Appreciate it, guys. Thank you.