A Medical Device Daily

Patient Safety Technologies (PST; Los Angeles) reported closing on an additional $2.5 million in financing in its recent private placement, bringing the total amount of equity raised during the current year to $3.6 million.

The company said that the proceeds will go towards capitalizing SurgiCount Medical (Temecula, California) in its efforts to gain market share.

Investors of the $2.5 million received 2 million shares of company common stock and a warrant to purchase another 1 million shares of common stock at $2 a share.

PST said it was "noteworthy" that about 25% of the $2.5 million came from corporate insiders and executives of either PST or SurgiCount.

"I believe these capital infusions, combined with the recent validation of our reexamined U.S. patent, will allow us to more effectively focus our efforts on educating the healthcare community on the benefits of computer assisted sponge counting and, ultimately, grow our revenues," said William Horne, CEO of PST.

"I believe this round of financing, coupled with the enthusiastic response to our Safety-Sponge System at the 54th Annual AORN [Association of Perioperative Nurses] Congress last month, will enable SurgiCount Medical to take advantage of current market opportunities. It was very evident at the AORN that the Health Care Community is ready for a solution to retained sponges in surgery. I feel certain SurgiCount Medical is well positioned to provide enhanced patient safety through utilization of our computer assisted counting technology," said Bill Adams, PST's president and SurgiCount's CEO.

Ault Glazer & Co. (Los Angeles/New York) was the exclusive placement agent for PST.

SurgiCount manufactures patient safety products and services. The SurgiCount Safety-Sponge System is an array of modified surgical sponges, line-of-sight scanning SurgiCounters, and printPAD printers integrated together to form a comprehensive counting and documentation system that will not allow the same sponge to be accidentally counted more than one time. When counts have been completed at the end of a procedure, the system will produce a printed report, or can be modified to work with a hospital's paperless system.

In other financing news:

MDS (Toronto), a provider of products and services to the life sciences markets, reported preliminary results of its substantial issuer bid, which expired at 5 p.m., EST, April 5.

MDS has accepted for purchase and cancellation 22,831,050 common shares at C$21.90 a share, totaling C$500 million in accordance with the terms of the bid. These shares represent 15.8% of the common shares currently outstanding. After the planned repurchase, the number of common shares outstanding will be around 121.9 million.

About 22.8 million common shares were tendered to the bid at prices at or below the purchase price of $21.90 a share.

Payment and settlement will be effected by Clearing Depository Services in accordance with its settlement procedures and the terms of the bid commencing on or about April 13, 2007.

RBC Capital Markets acted as dealer manager and financial advisor in connection with the substantial issuer bid.

MDS provides products and services for the development of drugs and the diagnosis and treatment of disease.