Before the Wall Street opening bell on Tuesday, Boston Scientific Corp. reported plans to acquire privately held Relievant Medsystems Inc. for $850 million in cash at closing plus undisclosed payments contingent on sales performance of the company’s lead product, the Intracept intraosseous nerve ablation system, over the next three years.
Med-tech deal values continued their upward swing, increasing nearly 90% from last year. Med-tech M&A volume and value remained in a slump compared to the previous two years, though values are higher than 2020.
Orthofix Medical Inc. terminated its CEO, chief financial officer and chief legal officer in a move that plunged the stock from $18.63 at Monday’s close to $13.01 by the end of Tuesday. The clean sweep of the executive suite followed the “unanimous decision by the board’s independent directors to terminate for cause Keith Valentine, John Bostjancic and Patrick Keran,” the company said in a statement that named their interim replacements. Valentine was also asked to resign from the board.
In August 2023, med-tech firms raised a total of $1.88 billion through 27 transactions, an increase of 94.12% from the $971 million raised in July. Value is down 42.83%, however, from the $3.3 billion raised in August 2022. The volume of med-tech financings is tracking at an average of 41 per month in 2023, down from an average of 43 per month in 2022, 59 per month through 2021 and 60 per month in 2020.
Two U.S. federal government departments recently issued a series of guidelines for their handling of mergers and acquisitions in a draft that has provoked both support and opposition from observers. Barry Nigro of the George Washington University School of Law said he is concerned that the presumption that a transaction is necessarily anticompetitive will prompt litigation over that presumption and thus bog down the process of reviewing these transactions.
Laborie Medical Technologies Inc. continued a string of recent deals with an agreement to acquire Urotronic Inc. for $255 million cash up front with an additional $345 million in payments contingent on meeting specified commercial and reimbursement milestones. Laborie already held a minority interest in the manufacturer of the Optilume drug-coated balloon technology for treatment of urethral strictures and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH).
Abbott Laboratories took the next step in its years-long collaboration with Bigfoot Biomedical Inc. with the announcement after the market close on September 6 that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire the connected insulin cap maker. The financial terms of the transaction, which is expected to close this month, were not disclosed.
Amber Therapeutics Ltd. has acquired Bioinduction Ltd. as well as its neuromodulation therapy platform, Picostim Dyneumo. Amber is currently using the platform, an implantable system to deliver its closed-loop therapy for mixed urinary incontinence, Amber-UI, in a first-in-human study. With early indications confirming the safety and feasibility of the surgical procedure and adaptive therapy, it made sense to acquire the hardware which allows for the therapy to work, CEO Aidan Crawley, CEO and co-founder of Amber told BioWorld.
Theken Companies LLC reported the acquisition of Visionair Solutions Inc. from the Cleveland Clinic, a deal that adds pulmonary therapy to its broad portfolio with Visionair’s 3D platform for the creation of silicon stents for central airway obstructions (CAOs). Terms of the transaction, which has officially closed, were not disclosed.
Abcam plc closed out a three-month whirlwind of activity on August 28 with an agreement to sell the medical consumables company to Danaher Corp. for a purchase price of $24 per share in cash, a 2.7% premium over the previous closing price, and assumption of approximately $200 million in debt. The deal, which has an enterprise value of $5.7 billion, is expected to close in mid-2024.