LONDON – These are hardly times for a fanfare, but this month saw the unveiling of a new name in bioprocessing, following the formal closing of the $21.4 billion sale of GE Healthcare’s Life Sciences to Danaher Corp. The business, now renamed Cytiva, has turnover of $3.3 billion, nearly 7,000 employees and operations in 40 countries. More than 75% of FDA-approved biologic drugs use its products in their manufacture.

A flurry of deal and M&A activity in the med-tech industry during the first quarter of 2020 has not translated into high financials, as many of the transactions are not disclosing terms. While the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, business development activities appear to be slumping in recent weeks, leaving the early part of the year significantly down from prior quarters.

Warsaw, Ind.-based Orthopediatrics Corp. is scooping up Apifix Ltd., allowing it to gain the Minimally Invasive Deformity Correction (MID-C) system, which is used to treat adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. BTIG’s Ryan Zimmerman noted that the deal has a potential value of $67 million plus potential future revenue milestones. “The initial upfront payment has a ~$37 [million] value, composed of $2 million in cash and ~935k shares of common stock,” he added.

TORONTO – If Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation get their way, a CA$33 million (US$24 million) initiative unveiled March 2 dramatically will increase patient access to made-to-measure ultrasound technology for penetrating the blood-brain barrier to treat Alzheimer's disease and brain cancer.

San Francisco-based Invitae Corp. is putting pedal to the metal in its quest to bring comprehensive genetic testing into mainstream clinical practice, reporting the acquisition of three companies – Diploid, Youscript Inc. and Genelex Labs LLC – following Tuesday’s market close. The total bill for the three deals comes to $195 million, $57 million of which is in cash.

Pharma has not gotten terribly serious yet about integrating digital health tools into clinical trials, let alone into their product offerings, despite the potential benefits they could offer when it comes to patient adherence, compliance and experience. Still, oncology giant Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. has made a small step in that direction by partnering with Paris-based digital therapeutics company Voluntis SA.

TORONTO – Newpro3D Inc., of North Vancouver, British Columbia, is making its ultra-fast 3D printing technology available to Düsseldorf, Germany-based Henkel AG & Co. KGaA to help it expand into production scale, additive manufacturing of medical devices. Newpro3D’s digital light processing (DLP) system enables its customers to manufacture hard and soft anatomical models used in surgical planning “at record speeds,” said Newpro3D COO Gabriel Castanon, eliminating the slow mechanical processes in more conventional 3D printing techniques.

AI-based, digital pathology startup Proscia Inc. has partnered with the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) to advance the practice of pathology via artificial intelligence (AI). The pair will start with prostate cancer and then plan to move on to validate approaches in several additional pathology subspecialties.

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Mass., has made a bold play in the molecular diagnostics market, including infectious disease testing, with its proposed $11.5 billion acquisition of Qiagen NV, of Venlo, Netherlands. Word of the deal comes after reports late last year that named Thermo Fisher as a potential suitor for Qiagen. However, in late December, Qiagen said it had wrapped up a review of potential strategic alternatives and decided its standalone business plan represented the best opportunity for value creation.

TORONTO – Montreal’s McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (The Neuro) have entered a research agreement with Pasadena, Calif.-based Fuzionaire Diagnostics Inc. to detect and treat neurodegenerative diseases through molecular imaging.