A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Celera (Alameda, California) reported completing the acquisition of Berkeley HeartLab (BHL; Burlingame, California) for about $195 million in cash. The deal was initially disclosed last month.

BHL is a cardiovascular healthcare company with a portfolio of CLIA-certified tests and disease management services focused on the secondary prevention market. It has about 300 employees including 110 laboratory personnel and about 80 field-based sales representatives and clinical educators. It will operate as a business unit of Celera.

Kathy Ordo ez, president of Celera, said, “We’re excited by the opportunities for sales growth from the existing product portfolio, as well as the development of potential new products around our emerging new molecular diagnostic tests that predict risk and individualize treatment in cardiovascular disease.”

Celera said it believes the acquisition will be accretive to earnings in the second half of FY08, excluding the impact of acquisition-related intangible amortization and transaction and integration expenses. The anticipated accretion will be included in Celera’s outlook for FY08 when the business presents its first quarter FY08 earnings results.

BHL operates a 40,000 square foot CLIA-certified testing laboratory in Alameda, California, and has eight regional disease management centers which anchor its 4MyHeart cardiovascular disease management program.

Celera is the molecular diagnostics business of Applera (Norwalk, Connecticut).

GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin) reported that it has completed the acquisition of Dynamic Imaging (Allendale, New Jersey), a developer of web-based image and information management.

GE said the acquisition of Dynamic and its IntegradWeb suite of products, will allow the company to expand its offerings of information technology (IT) products and services across all segments of healthcare - throughout hospital integrated delivery networks (IDNs), community hospitals, outpatient imaging centers, radiology group practices, and physician offices. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“The simplicity and power of our web-based picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and integrated RIS/PACS, combined with GE’s broad suite of IT offerings, will redefine the market’s expectation for complete interpretive and review access, by any authorized user, of any imaging study, anytime, anywhere,” said Alex Jurovitsky, CEO, Dynamic Imaging. “Applying the capabilities of IntegradWeb to GE’s PACS offerings, the newfound flexibility for radiologists and referring physicians worldwide, as well as the broader impact to patient care, will be simply astounding.”

GE said the Dynamic Imaging Solutions unit will assist healthcare organizations in growing their imaging-based procedural medicine business through dramatically improved provider physician and patient access, streamlined workflow and instantaneous reporting of imaging results to referring physicians, all on a common platform with workflow tools for all settings.

In other dealmaking news:

• Sunquest Information Systems (Tucson, Arizona) reported its formation and status as a privately-held corporation. The company was established when Vista Equity Partners completed its acquisition of Diagnostics Systems from Misys Healthcare (Raleigh, North Carolina). Sunquest now owns all business assets, technology, and products associated with the hospital systems diagnostic portfolio, including the Laboratory, Commercial Laboratory, and Clinical Financial products, as well as stand-alone systems for Radiology and Pharmacy departments. Richard Atkin, former president of the Hospital Systems Business Unit for Misys, has been named president/CEO of Sunquest. The company said it anticipates minimal impact on day-to-day operations as it has been run largely as a stand-alone operation of Misys.

Misys agreed tio transfer the ownership of Diagnostics Systems back in July.

Misys develops software and services that are designed to enable physicians and caregivers to more easily manage the complexities of healthcare.

Sunquest develops a comprehensive suite of information products for hospitals and laboratories that include laboratory, radiology, and pharmacy systems. Sunquest uses open systems that are scalable to any size hospital or healthcare network.

• Hologic (Bedford, Massachusetts), a provider of diagnostic and digital imaging systems directed towards women’s health, reported that ISS, the independent proxy advisory service, recommends that Hologic stockholders vote for the company’s proposed merger with Cytyc (Marlborough, Massachusetts).

“We appreciate the support that ISS has given to our combination with Cytyc and to Hologic’s stock plan,” said Jack Cumming, Hologic’s CEO/chairman. “Together with Cytyc, we will be a global leader in women’s healthcare. We look forward to realizing the many benefits this combination creates.”

In May, the companies entered into a definitive agreement to combine in a cash and stock transaction, under which Cytyc stockholders would receive 0.52 of a share of Hologic common stock and $16.50 in cash for each share of Cytyc common stock they own for a total consideration of about $6.2 billion.

A special meeting of the stockholders of Hologic to consider and vote upon the transactions contemplated by the proposed merger with Cytyc has been scheduled for today, at Hologic’s headquarters in Bedford, Massachusetts.

• Lab 21 (Cambridge, UK), a provider of health and environmental diagnostics, reported an exclusive license with Ark Therapeutics (London) for a test to measure autoantibodies to oxidized low density lipoprotein (oxLDL), a predictive risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD).

The oxLDL test is designed to identify those at the greatest risk for developing CHD, with the companies targeting the emergency room setting.

Ox-LDL is released from atherosclerotic plaque as the plaque becomes more unstable, and thus with the increasing likelihood that an area of it will break away from the surface of the blood vessel and obstruct either the coronary artery or a cerebral vessel. Because oxLDL has a very short half life within the blood, measuring it accurately is difficult. However, the body rapidly produces auto-antibodies and these can be measured by the appropriate antigens.