A Medical Device Daily

Lifestream Technologies (Post Falls, Idaho), a supplier of cholesterol monitors, said that it is seeking “strategic alternatives” for all or portions of its business and is focusing on “orderly wind-down” and sale of its assets.

The company reported that its stock is expected to be delisted from the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board, effective Nov. 3, due to its failure to timely file its annual report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2006. The company’s stock also trades on the “Pink Sheets,” which is not affected by the pending delisting from the OTC Bulletin Board.

The company reported that together with Lifestream Diagnostics , it has entered into a forbearance agreement with its senior lender, RAB Special Situations Fund, and that it has engaged the turnaround specialist firm Conway MacKenzie & Dunleavy (CM&D) to provide restructuring services. The company appointed Frank Mack, a managing director of CM&D, as chief restructuring officer.

The company’s contract with CM&D provides that it will pay for the service of CM&D personnel on an hourly basis at rates ranging from $235 to $495 per hour.

Sequenom (San Diego) reported that it has secured exclusive rights in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia to intellectual property for non-invasive prenatal gender testing through a license agreement with Isis Innovation, the technology transfer company of the University of Oxford (Oxford, UK). Financial terms were not disclosed.

The IP rights expand an earlier agreement between Sequenom and Isis in October 2005, under which Sequenom exclusively licensed rights for non-invasive prenatal genetic diagnostic testing on fetal nucleic acids derived from maternal plasma or serum.

The license “presents an expansive consumer-driven opportunity for Sequenom to commercialize an accurate and safe test that satisfies the desire of couples to know the gender of their baby early in pregnancy,” said Harry Stylli, PhD, president/CEO of Sequenom. “We believe that a high quality, noninvasive gender test targeting the first trimester of pregnancy has significant commercial potential for the more than 10 million births annually that occur in the licensed territories. Sequenom plans to commercialize this opportunity through partnerships with qualified laboratories.”

The company noted that gender determination also has relevance in prenatal diagnosis of certain X-linked diseases, such as hemophilia, fragile X and congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

Sequenom said that the licensed rights enable development of tests on any relevant platform, including its Massarray system, which is “highly enabling for certain prenatal tests.” The company said it plans to introduce research-use only testing for fetal Rhesus D (RhD) in the first half of 2007. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta), about 20,000 high-risk RhD births occur out of 420,000 RhD incompatible pregnancies in the U.S. annually. In addition, Sequenom said it is establishing the “advanced pre-analytics necessary to conduct the more technically challenging tests needed for cystic fibrosis, aneuploidies and others.”

Sequenom’s focus is prenatal diagnostics and other applications where complex, trace nucleic acid analysis, primarily in women’s health.

In other dealmaking news:

• Meridian Bioscience (Cincinnati) completed a license agreement with Eiken Chemical (Japan), for its Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) technology, a nucleic acid amplification method that it said is “simple to perform, rapid, highly specific and performed at a single temperature.” No terms were disclosed.

The agreement allows Meridian to apply LAMP technology for the detection of infectious diseases in the U.S. and 18 other geographic markets, it said.

No specialized equipment is necessary to perform the assay or to determine the final result, Meridian said. Results are typically obtained one hour after the start of the assay. Meridian makes a range of diagnostic test kits, purified reagents and related products and offers biopharmaceutical-enabling technologies.

• Cogdell Spencer (Charlotte, North Carolina) reported groundbreaking for a $15.5 million joint venture on the Health Campus of Lancaster General Hospital (Lancaster, Pennsylvania).

This three-story, 64,070 square foot medical office building will be anchored by an Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) to be called Physicians’ Surgery Center . The ASC will occupy the first floor of the building while the top two floors will be completed to house multi-specialty tenants. The building is the first joint-venture project to break ground since Cogdell Spencer’s initial public offering in October of 2005.

Cogdell Spencer said it will be treating the Lancaster project as a consolidated subsidiary. It expects to admit to the project physician-tenants who may end up owning in excess of 50% of the venture, but it has determined to consolidate the venture based on the company’s authority as managing member and the rights the company will retain in the overall management of the project.

Cogdell Spencer is a self-administered, self-managed real estate investment trust that invests in medical offices, ambulatory surgery and diagnostic centers.