• CardioNet (San Diego) a provider of wireless mobile cardiac outpatient monitoring solutions, reported that it completed its previously disclosed acquisition of PDSHeart (West Palm Beach, Florida), a cardiac event monitoring company. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. With the merger, CardioNet said it is now the largest U.S. company providing wireless, remote outpatient cardiac monitoring, event, Holter and pacer services. PDSHeart will operate as a CardioNet subsidiary, with corporate offices in West Palm Beach, Florida. The combined company has monitoring centers in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Florida and Georgia.

• Greatbatch (Clarence, New York) reported that it will acquire substantially all of the assets of Biomec (Cleveland, Ohio) for $11.4 million in cash and future additional considerations. Greatbatch said that the agreement is subject to Biomec shareholder approval. Biomec was established in 1998 with the goal of accelerating promising technology from major medical and academic institutions, national laboratories, and internal developments to successful commercial products. It reports that it is developing a polymer coating (biomimetic) that mimics the surface of endothelial cells of blood vessels with potential use on several medical devices, including in-dwelling central venous catheters, cardiac pacing leads, and extra-corporeal blood pump circuits in bypass surgery. Additionally, the company has a product development and an investment partnership in IntElect Medical (Cleveland), an early-stage neurostimulation device company that works in conjunction with the Cleveland Clinic. Greatbatch develops components used in implantable medical devices and other demanding applications.

• VitalStream Health, a new business spun out of the Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland, Ohio) will develop technology enabling physicians to monitor chronically ill patients remotely, from watching blood pressure via telephone lines to one day keeping tabs on heart rhythms from a distance. The new business has teamed with a venture capital firm, Glengary (Cleveland); Dan Carlin, MD, a telemedicine physician in New Hampshire, and an information technology veteran in Massachusetts to form VitalStream, the latest out of the CCF Innovations, an arm of the clinic. The system will be used to gather health information from afar to generate online patient report cards that doctors will use to help treat people. The idea belongs to Glengary and Carlin, founder of telemedicine practice WorldClinic (New London, New Hampshire) in 1998. Drawing from his experience as a medical officer in the Navy and as an expatriate volunteer, Carlin said he designed WorldClinic to be a “teledoctor” for patients who are far from modern medical care. “My patients who are scattered around the world are getting older,” Carlin said. “I needed a way to do a better job of taking care of them.” Glengary, allied with Baldwin-Wallace College (Berea, Ohio), invests in early-stage companies, mostly in northeast Ohio. Dr. Marc Penn, director of the Clinic’s Bakken Heart-Brain Institute and medical director of its coronary intensive care unit, will be the lead clinical researcher on the project. The partners are raising money and hiring the management team to run VitalStream, Rosenfeld said.