A Medical Device Daily

Greatbatch (Clarence, New York) reported that its subsidiary Precimed (Orvin, Switzerland/Exton, Pennsylvania) has successfully completed the previously disclosed acquisition of DePuy Orthopedic’s (Warsaw, Indiana) Chaumont, France manufacturing facility. Pricing terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Chaumont facility will continue to produce primary hip stems and shoulder implants for DePuy for the foreseeable future.

Greatbatch said this transaction, including a new 4-year supply agreement with DePuy, enhances it and Precimed’s strategic relationship with one of the largest orthopedic companies in the world. The addition of this facility will align Precimed closer to its orthopedic OEM customers and further extends its offerings to a full range of orthopedic implants notably for the hip, shoulder and knee segments, it said.

The Chaumont facility has about 200 employees with large-scale manufacturing expertise including machining of metals and plastics, engraving and laser etching, surface treatments, in house HA coatings capabilities and a Class 100,000 clean room with the ability to deliver a sterile packaged, fully labeled implant.

The acquisition of the DePuy facility was structured as an asset purchase. The purchase price was funded with cash on hand and availability under Greatbatch’s revolving credit agreement.

Greatbatch is a developer of critical components used in medical devices for the cardiac rhythm management, neurostimulation, vascular, orthopedic and interventional radiology markets. Additionally, Electrochem Commercial Power, a subsidiary of Greatbatch, makes electrochemical cells, battery packs and wireless sensors for applications such as oil and gas exploration, pipeline inspection, military, asset tracking, oceanography, external medical and seismic surveying.

In other deal making news:

• Grubb & Ellis Healthcare REIT (Santa Ana, California) said it has acquired Medical Portfolio 1, consisting of five medical office buildings, Doctor’s Medical Building, Largo Medical Arts, West Bay Surgery Center, Brandon Medical Plaza and Central Florida SurgiCenter. The portfolio, in Florida and Kansas, consists of about 162,000 square feet of gross leasable area. The buildings are either situated on the campuses of, or affiliated with HCA (Nashville, Tennessee), a large non-profit health system.

• U.S. Renal Care (USRC; Dallas), a provider of outpatient kidney dialysis services, has formed a joint venture with Eumana Home Dialysis (Houston).

USRC has acquired a majority interest in the assets of an existing home dialysis program that serves the needs of home dialysis patients in and around Houston. Eumana provides home hemodialysis, acute hemodialysis, and peritoneal dialysis in patient’s homes and in the hospital.

USRC plans to expand Eumana’s service offering of home dialysis in other markets where it already operates.

Eumana provides home and acute dialysis treatments in 12 counties in the Houston area.

USRC operates outpatient treatment centers for chronic kidney failure patients.

• Luminos (Ann Arbor, Michigan) reported an exclusive license agreement with the University of Pittsburgh to use its technology to develop and sell detection kits, which contain a new fluorescent sense to detect the rare metals palladium and platinum. The fluorescent molecule was developed in Kazunori Koide’s lab, a chemistry professor at the university. According to the company, the technology allows the user to quantitatively detect palladium or platinum in samples simply and rapidly using the fluorescent signal generated.

Luminos said the technology has applications in multiple product areas. It expects the first product using the technology to be on the market by late summer.

Luminos develops assay kit products for the detection of important biological molecules.

• Luminex (Austin, Texas) said it has renewed and expanded Invitrogen’s (Carlsbad, California) license and supply agreement for Luminex’s multiplexed analyte detection technology and systems. The new agreement extends the lifetime of the license and provides Invitrogen with access to Luminex’s next-generation multiplex detection platforms.

xMAP Technology and Luminex instrument platforms use proprietary microspheres - micron-sized beads - encoded with combinations of spectrally distinct fluorescent dyes to rapidly and reproducibly determine the relative concentrations of many different proteins or peptides at the same time in the same sample.

Invitrogen offers more than 200 assays based on xMAP Technology. Invitrogen also has a large number of new multiplexed assays in its product development pipeline to expand the number of targets accessible to scientists. The company will offer custom assay development services using the next-generation platform that complement its existing service of rapid, affordable multiplex assay development on the original Luminex platform.

“We are pleased with this new agreement and committed to our relationship with Luminex,” said Kip Miller, Invitrogen’s senior VP, BioDiscovery. “It is another step in our strategy of building on our position as the leading cell biology reagent provider to offer our customers integrated systems and solutions.”

Luminex develops biological testing technologies with applications throughout the diagnostic and life sciences industries.