A Medical Device Daily
Royal Philips Electronics (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) said it has reached an agreement to acquire Dixtal Biomédica e Tecnologia (São Paulo, Brazil) Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Dixtal is a manufacturer of in-hospital patient monitoring, anesthesia and ventilation equipment, and ECGs as well as other sensors for vital sign measurements. It will become part of the Patient Monitoring business within Philips' Healthcare sector, and Philips said it expects Dixtal's financial results will be consolidated in that business as of 3Q08.
"Emerging markets represent a real opportunity for us to keep growing our healthcare business at Philips," said Daurio Speranzini J nior, senior VP of Philips Healthcare Latin America. "If you just take Latin America, our addressable healthcare market in 2007 was estimated to be valued at approximately 11.2 billion, and growing at twice the rate of developed markets. Acquiring Dixtal will help us further tap into that growth."
Speranzini J nior said acquisition complements Philips' recent move into the non-invasive ventilation business through its nearly $5.2 billion acquisition earlier this year of Respironics (Murrysville, Pennsylvania). "And since Dixtal and Philips use the same distribution channels vis- -vis hospitals for all of our critical-care businesses, we can expect significant synergies coming out of this collaboration."
Founded in 1978, Dixtal employs about 300, mainly in Brazil, of which 60 work in R&D.
Covidien (St. Louis), a provider of healthcare products, reported that it has signed an agreement with privately held Pinyons Medical Technology (Park City, Utah), and its president/CEO, Shawn Fojtik, to acquire all assets related to the Pinyons PowrSyringe Injector and PowrSyringe Monitor handheld, manual injection and inflation devices.
These devices facilitate manual X-ray contrast media injections during angiography procedures performed in the cardiac cath lab and interventional radiology suite.
"The acquisition of the Pinyons products is important strategically to our delivery systems business," said Steve Hanley, president, imaging solutions at Covidien. "The hand-held, manual injector adds a novel delivery system technology to the products we offer our customers and provides a platform for future innovation."
Covidien immediately obtains all assets related to these two Pinyons product lines, including all intellectual property, current and future product designs and regulatory filings and approvals. The injection and inflation devices have received clearance from FDA.
Covidien manufactures product lines in four segments: Medical Devices, Imaging Solutions, Pharmaceutical Products and Medical Supplies.
In other dealmaking news:
• BD (Becton, Dickinson and Co.; Franklin Lakes, New Jersey) said it has acquired all of the outstanding stock of Cytopeia (Seattle), a privately held company that develops advanced flow cytometry cell sorting instruments.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on BD's fiscal 2008 earnings, it said.
BD said Cytopeia's Influx cell sorter offers BD an open, configurable cell sorting platform that can be fully optimized for researchers' application-specific requirements. The company said the Influx cell sorter is suited for a range of applications including cell therapy research, stem cell research, drug discovery and development, as well as marine biology.
As part of the transaction, Ger van den Engh, PhD, will join BD Biosciences, a segment of BD, as VP of advanced cytometry. In this role, he will manage continuing research and technology development activities in Seattle.
BD makes devices, instrument systems and reagents.
• Tenet Healthcare (Dallas) reported details of its previously disclosed plan to sell 34 medical office buildings, totaling 2.4 million square feet of rental space. The properties are located throughout the Southeast, as well as Texas, Florida and California. Tenet has retained Jones Lang LaSalle, a nationally recognized real estate broker and advisor, to assist it in the promotion, marketing and sale of the medical office building.
"This portfolio sale will allow our hospitals to focus on our core business of caring for patients and removes the non-core function of property management responsibilities," said Biggs Porter, Tenet's CFO, noting that "the sale increases our financial flexibility and frees up resources that can be more effectively invested in our core operations."
• Vibra Healthcare (Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania) reported that it has acquired a long-term acute-care hospital (LTACH) in southeastern Michigan. The 83-bed hospital, which was not named, will continue to operate as the largest free-standing such facility in Michigan. It will be known as Vibra of Southeastern Michigan.
LTACHs provide specialized acute and rehabilitative care to medically complex patients. These patients are critically ill or have multi-system complications or failures that require extended acute-care treatment after discharge from a traditional acute-care hospital, typically from the intensive-care unit.