A Medical Device Daily

Clinical Data (Newton, Massachusetts) and Beckman Coulter (Orange County, California) reported that the companies have signed a definitive agreement for Beckman Coulter to acquire Clinical Data's Cogenics division for about $17 million.

The sale will complete a key element of Clinical Data's strategic initiative to monetize non-core assets and focus resources on advancing the company's two late-stage targeted therapeutic programs. The acquisition of Cogenics complements Beckman Coulter's Agencourt Biosciences' business, which delivers genomic services and nucleic acid purification products, and expands its reach into new territories.

"We expect the combination of Beckman Coulter's Agencourt business with Cogenics will create a leading global genomic service business with a wide range of services arrayed on multiple technology platforms," said Susan Evans, vice president and general manager of Agencourt. "We are excited about the new opportunities and confident that these combined offerings will enable us to meet the full spectrum of service requirements sequencing, genotyping, gene expression, and DNA and RNA extraction for researchers around the world."

Clinical Data will receive about $15.4 million at the closing, which is expected in April. In addition, Clinical Data expects to retain about $2 million in cash from Cogenics immediately prior to the sale. In exchange, Beckman Coulter will acquire all of Cogenics' operations in the U.S., UK, Germany and France.

"This important transaction represents an integral part of our strategic plan to focus our resources on developing targeted therapeutics and advancing proprietary biomarker programs," said Drew Fromkin, president/CEO of Clinical Data. "The sale of Cogenics to Beckman Coulter also creates substantial near-term value and cost savings through the divestiture of a non-core program as we approach the completion of our Phase III registration trial of vilazodone, expected in the second calendar quarter of 2009. We are confident that Beckman Coulter's Agencourt business, which is already widely recognized for high quality genomics services, will build upon the success of Cogenics in delivering the industry's most innovative solutions to a growing list of customers."

In other dealmaking news:

• CardioNet (Conshohocken, Pennsylvania) reported its entry into the cardiac clinical research services business and the acquisition of Biotel (Eagan, Minnesota). The two companies entered into a binding definitive merger agreement for CardioNet to acquire Biotel for $4.82 per share in cash, for a total transaction value of about $14 million.

The acquisition of Biotel expands CardioNet's product portfolio with a recently approved wireless event monitor, enhancing CardioNet's leadership position in the rapidly emerging field of wireless medicine, the company said. With the acquisition, CardioNet said it now provides physicians and patients with the most comprehensive array of products for the diagnosis and monitoring of cardiac arrhythmias. The company's product portfolio will include Holter monitoring, wireless event monitoring and CardioNet's Mobile Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry (MCOT), a system for wireless diagnosis and monitoring of cardiac arrhythmias.

As part of the acquisition, CardioNet is acquiring Biotel's wholly-owned subsidiary, Agility Centralized Research Services (Chicago). Agility provides event, Holter and 12 lead ECG monitoring services to the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, as well as to contract research and academic research organizations worldwide.

Expanding its capabilities to deliver complete medical imaging and healthcare solutions, Canon U.S.A. (Lake Success, New York) said that the company has acquired Virtual Imaging (Deerfield Beach, Florida), a provider of diagnostic imaging solutions and a medical systems integrator. With more than 100 employees, including a national sales and service organization, Virtual Imaging serves large complex hospital organizations, imaging centers and private physician offices, and is the national distributor of Canon's digital radiography systems.

• Amicas (Boston) reported the successful completion of the tender offer by its wholly-owned subsidiary Amicas Acquisition for shares of common stock of Emageon (Birmingham, Alabama). The tender offer expired at midnight on April 1.

The depositary for the tender offer has advised Amicas that shareholders of Emageon have tendered and not withdrawn a total of about 18,882,734 shares of Emageon common stock. These shares represent about 88% of the outstanding shares of Emageon. Amicas Acquisition has accepted for payment all Emageon shares tendered in the offer.

Blood management solutions provider Haemonetics (Braintree, Massachusetts) has acquired Altivation Software (Chico, California), a privately held information management company. Details of the transaction were not disclosed. Altivation provides resource management software for the blood banking industry. Altivation markets Hemasphere, a real-time database which provides a dashboard of operational information to blood center management and which automates resource and sponsor management of blood drives.