Abbott plans to complete St. Jude Medical acquisition this week
Abbott Laboratories announced that it plans on completing its acquisition of St. Jude Medical Jan. 4.
Abbott agreed in April to pay approximately $25 billion in a cash and stock to buy St. Jude Medical, which is known for its devices for heart failure, atrial fibrillation and cardiac rhythm management.
As part of the deal, the companies sold St. Jude’s vascular closure device business and Abbott’s steerable sheath business for $1.12 billion to Terumo Corporation.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) required the companies to divest those businesses before agreeing to sanction the acquisition. If the companies had not done so, the FTC said Abbott and St. Jude Medical would control more than 70 percent of the market for vascular closure devices and most of the market for steerable sheaths.
The FTC also required Abbott to notify the FTC if it intends on acquiring lesion-assessing ablation catheter assets from Advanced Cardiac Therapeutics. As of now, St. Jude Medical is one of only two companies that provide lesion-assessing ablation catheters in the U.S., according to the FTC.
In August, a research firm called Muddy Waters raised concerns about the potential hacking of St. Jude Medical’s pacemakers and defibrillators. The next month, St. Jude filed a lawsuit against Muddy Waters, a startup cybersecurity research firm, and three employees of the company for false statements.
St. Jude Medical also issued an advisory in October warning of premature battery depletion associated with lithium deposits in a small number of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy ICDs.
Abbott, meanwhile, filed a complaint in December to terminate its proposed $5.8 billion acquisition of Alere. Since Abbott agreed to acquire Alere last January, Alere has been the subject of government subpoenas, recalled devices and delayed filing its 10-K for five months.
With the St. Jude Medical acquisition, Abbott said it would be among the top two companies in several cardiovascular device markets. The company cited a few devices that it will focus on in the coming years, including the EnSite Precision cardiac mapping system, the ConfirmRx implantablet cardiac monitor, the HeartMate 3 for patients with advanced stage heart failure, the Portico transcatheter aortic heart valves for patients with severe aortic stenosis, the Proclaim DRG system for patients with chronic pain, the Absorb bioresorbable coronary stent and the MitraClip transcatheter mitral valve repair device.
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.