Medical Device Daily

Oracle Healthcare Acquisition (Greenwich, Connecticut), a publicly-traded special-purpose acquisition company, reported an agreement to merge with privately-owned Precision Therapeutics (Pittsburgh), a life sciences company developing tests intended for assisting physicians in individualizing cancer therapy to improve treatments.

Oracle will become a subsidiary of Precision and will change its name to Precision Therapeutics Corp. The combined company will be headquartered in Pittsburgh.

The companies expect that Oracle would apply to have its shares trade on Nasdaq after the merger is complete. Oracle is expected to have about $120 million in cash at closing, not including expenses related to the merger. This money would remain in the merged company for sales and marketing, product development, clinical trials, R&D, and general corporate purposes, Oracle said.

Precision has developed the ChemoFx, a chemoresponse test, a type of test that uses a patient's liver tumor cells to assess his or her likelihood of responding to various cancer drugs, or drug combinations, that the patient's doctor is considering for treatment. The test is designed to measure both the responsiveness of tumor cells to particular drugs, as well as their resistance.

"We believe that Precision has a very important technology to add to the arsenal for cancer therapies being used today, the company has good growth prospects, so that's what attracted us to the merger," Joel Liffman, president/COO of Oracle told Medical Device Daily.

Liffman said more details about the merger would be disclosed "in a few days" when the proxy is filed.

Sean McDonald, president/CEO of Precision, would become president/CEO and a director of the combined company. Oracle board members Larry Feinberg, Liffmann and Per G. H. Lofberg would remain on the board of the combined company after the merger, as would Kevin Johnson, who is a member of the boards of both Oracle and Precision.

Feinberg said Precision has raised about $73 million in venture capital from investors since the company's inception. He said the ChemoFx test has been validated in "numerous" clinical studies and has been reimbursed by Medicare and insurance companies.

Harvard Bioscience (HBIO; Holliston, Massachusetts) said it has completed the sale of Genomic Solutions Division (Ann Arbor, Michigan) and its Belgian subsidiary, Maia Scientific (Geel), both part of its Capital Equipment business segment, to Digilab (Canton, Massachusetts).

The purchase price consists of $1 million in cash, plus additional consideration in the form of an earn-out based on 20% of the revenue generated by the acquired business as it is conducted by Digilab over the three-year period following the transaction.

HBIO retains the rights to certain deferred tax assets, which are currently offset by valuation allowances. The COPAS flow cytometry product line held by the company's Union Biometrica U.S. and German subsidiaries, was not included in this sale, and HBIO said it intends to pursue a sale of this product line in a separate deal.

HBIO makes a range of specialized products, primarily scientific instruments and apparatus, used to advance life science research at pharmaceutical and biotech companies, universities and government laboratories.

Digilab provides products and services for the life sciences research and in-vitro diagnostics markets, including pharma and biotech industries, universities and governments.