Acquisitions

BBI Newsletter, The, Oct 1, 1998

* ADM Tronics (Northvale, New Jersey) has pur-chased the SofPulse technology of Electropharmacology Inc. (EI; Pompano Beach, Florida) for 3 million shares of ADM stock and $150,000 in cash, with EI keeping 1.4 mil-lion shares and selling the rest to clear off its balance sheet. EI is remaking itself into a developmental-stage biotech firm and changing its name to Gemini Health after acquiring Gemini Biotech (The Woodlands, Texas) and HealthTech.

* Alexon-Trend (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), a sub-sidiary of Sybron Laboratory Products, has purchased the diagnostic products business of Seradyn (Indianapolis, Indiana), a maker of infectious disease diagnostic reagents and test kits and uniform latex particles used to produce diagnostic reagents. Terms were not disclosed. * American Dental Technologies (Southfield, Mich-igan) has purchased Dental Vision Direct (DVD) for $6.9 million, a combination of $3.9 million for assets and $3 million for goodwill and intellectual properties. The pur-chase gives American Dental ownership of DVD's flag-ship product, the UltraCam intraoral camera. DVD's California manufacturing operations will be consolidat-ed into American Dental's facility in Texas. * Amersham Pharmacia Biotech (Uppsala, Sweden) is merging with bioinformatics specialist Molecular Dynamics (Sunnyvale, California) for $256 million. The deal, a straight stock purchase, was expected to be com-pleted by early this month. Amersham Pharmacia Biotech planned a cash tender offer of $20.50 per share for Molecular Dynamics' stock, pending shareholder and regulatory approval. The deal makes Amersham a major player in bioinformatics and enhances Molecular Dynamics' ability to market its sequence analysis soft-ware. The merger also will accelerate commercialization of MegBACE, a high-throughput DNA sequencing sys-tem developed as the result of a 1994 Amersham Phar-macia Biotech/Molecular Dynamics agreement. * Diagnostic Imaging (Jacksonville, Florida), a whol-ly owned subsidiary of PSS World Medical, will acquire the stock of Gilbert X-Ray Company Inc. of Texas (Dal-las), an employee-owned imaging service provider with nine locations and annual revenues of about $80 million. Gilbert will become a subsidiary of Diagnostic Imaging. The transaction will be a cash purchase. * Diomed Ltd. (Cambridge, United Kingdom) has acquired the assets of LaserLite LLC (Boston, Massachu-setts). The two companies formed a partnership in 1997 to develop lasers for aesthetic procedures, and in April 1998 the FDA approved the LaserLite diode system, which has since been introduced to the U.S. market. Diomed is a developer of high-powered diode laser sys-tems for medical, dental and scientific applications. Terms were not disclosed. * HiChem Diagnostics, a unit of Elan Pharmaceuti-cals (Gainesville, Georgia), said it will acquire the world-wide marketing rights for products developed and man-ufactured by Sepsis for the rapid detection of endotoxin-related infection in critically ill patients. Sepsis is a sub-sidiary of Spectral Diagnostics (Toronto, Canada). Sep-sis will receive development and licensing fees, as well as milestone payments. During the development, HiChem will fund up to $6 million, followed by milestone pay-ments based on product submissions and regulatory approvals. HiChem will acquire from existing sharehold-ers a 7.5% equity interest in Sepsis for $2 million and has the right to acquire another 2.5% interest from existing shareholders upon a possible IPO of Sepsis stock. * Medical Device Technologies (San Diego, Califor-nia) has purchased Vision Diagnostics and four of its MRI centers in Orlando and Jacksonville, Florida, Oak Brook, Illinois, and Toledo, Ohio. * OSI Systems (Hawthorne, California) has pur-chased Osteometer MediTech A/S, a Danish manufac-turer of diagnostic scanners to detect osteoporosis, for $7.75 million. Osteometer MediTech's primary product is the DTX-200, an FDA-approved forearm dual-energy X-ray densitometer for rapid osteoporosis assessment and follow-up bone density measurements. * Rehabilicare (New Brighton, Minnesota), a devel-oper of electromedical pain management and rehabilita-tion products, has purchased the Homecare (Akron, Ohio) unit of Henley Healthcare (Sugar Land, Texas), a maker of products to control acute or chronic pain. Hen-ley's Homecare division distributes home electrothera-py products through a direct sales force concentrated in the Midwest and Northern California. Henley said it will use the proceeds from the cash transaction to pay down its revolving debt. * Utah Medical Products (UM; Midvale, Utah) has purchased the neonatal product line assets of Gesco International and Bard Access Systems, both sub-sidiaries of C.R. Bard (Murray Hill, New Jersey). The purchase includes manufacturing processes and all intellectual property rights of the businesses. Gesco's products are used in Level II neonatal intensive care units of hospitals for the care of critically ill babies. As part of the purchase of Bard Access Systems, Utah Medical will become the exclusive distributor of that company's 2.0 Fr neonatal Per-Cu-Cath catheter. Bard and UM also entered into a supply agreement in which Bard will provide UM with the specialty small-diameter silicone tubing that is a key component of many Gesco catheter products. The acquisition included cash pay-ments and a royalty on future sales of Gesco products by Utah Medical. Source: The BBI Newsletter