Before the Wall Street opening bell on Tuesday, Boston Scientific Corp. reported plans to acquire privately held Relievant Medsystems Inc. for $850 million in cash at closing plus undisclosed payments contingent on sales performance of the company’s lead product, the Intracept intraosseous nerve ablation system, over the next three years.
Orthofix Medical Inc. terminated its CEO, chief financial officer and chief legal officer in a move that plunged the stock from $18.63 at Monday’s close to $13.01 by the end of Tuesday. The clean sweep of the executive suite followed the “unanimous decision by the board’s independent directors to terminate for cause Keith Valentine, John Bostjancic and Patrick Keran,” the company said in a statement that named their interim replacements. Valentine was also asked to resign from the board.
In August 2023, med-tech firms raised a total of $1.88 billion through 27 transactions, an increase of 94.12% from the $971 million raised in July. Value is down 42.83%, however, from the $3.3 billion raised in August 2022. The volume of med-tech financings is tracking at an average of 41 per month in 2023, down from an average of 43 per month in 2022, 59 per month through 2021 and 60 per month in 2020.
Two U.S. federal government departments recently issued a series of guidelines for their handling of mergers and acquisitions in a draft that has provoked both support and opposition from observers. Barry Nigro of the George Washington University School of Law said he is concerned that the presumption that a transaction is necessarily anticompetitive will prompt litigation over that presumption and thus bog down the process of reviewing these transactions.
The U.S. FTC’s antitrust challenge to Amgen Inc.’s $27.8 billion acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics plc has been resolved. Amgen agreed to do what it said it would do all along: not bundle pharmacy benefit manager rebates on high volume blockbuster drugs Tepezza and Krystexxa.
The first special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger announced in 2023 has fallen apart. Aprinoia Therapeutics Inc. and Ross Acquisition Corp. II mutually agreed to call off the merger that had been valued at $280 million. The failed deal is part of a larger trend that has gained momentum in the past year as a struggling economy and tighter U.S. SEC restrictions dampened SPAC deals.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have floated a new set of guidelines that would govern their reviews of mergers in a variety of markets, including the drug and device industries. While many of these guidelines are vaguely worded and open to interpretation, one of the more ambiguously worded passages states that a merger may be rejected if it could create “a clog on competition,” a phrase that appears in a Supreme Court decision handed down more than 60 years ago.
Jounce Therapeutics Inc. is leaving Redx Pharma plc at the altar after deciding instead to merge with Concentra Biosciences LLC. In late February, Jounce had said it planned to merge with Redx in an all-share transaction that would have created a $425 million combined entity.
When Glaxosmithkline plc’s new CEO, Emma Walmsley, was hiring a “dream team” of executives to lead the company in 2017, former Genentech whizz Hal Barron was the star signing as chief scientific officer. Lured away from Alphabet Inc.’s biotech subsidiary, Calico LLC, by a bumper pay deal, Barron was arguably Walmsley’s most important appointment. Walmsley badly needed a strong leader with credible expertise in science to lead the company’s R&D efforts, as her expertise and experience came from the company’s consumer operation. But as GSK plans to split later this year, Barron is heading for the exit to become CEO of California’s ambitious and enormously well-funded startup Altos Labs Inc.
