Say hello to MassDevice +5, a bite-sized view of the top five medtech stories of the day. This feature of MassDevice.com’s coverage highlights our 5 biggest and most influential stories from the day’s news to make sure you’re up to date on the headlines that continue to shape the medical device industry.
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5. Pavmed extends $6m IPO
Pavmed said earlier this week it will extend its heavily reduced $6 million IPO an additional 45 days.
The IPO was dramatically reduced in January, with the company announcing that it planned to float a reduced 1.2 million shares at $5 a piece. Pavmed expects the IPO to bring in $5.4 million after sales commissions but before expenses. The offering includes an 800,000-share over-allotment option, the company said. Read more
4. Medtronic looks to open board to shareholders
Medtronic proposed today to allow long-term shareholders to nominate candidates for its board of directors, saying it will ask stockowners to approve the measure at its annual meeting in December.
Fridley, Minn.-based Medtronic, the largest pure-play medical device maker, said the so-called “proxy access” would allow a shareholder or a group of up to 20 shareholders to nominate candidates to make up as much as 20% of its board. Nominating shareholders would have to own at least a 3% stake held continuously for at least 3 years, the company said. Read more
3. Jury slaps Johnson & Johnson with $500m verdict in Pinnacle hip bellwether
A Texas federal jury today slapped Johnson & Johnson subsidiary DePuy Orthopaedics with a $500 million judgment in favor of a quintet of plaintiffs who said the metal-on-metal Pinnacle hip implant caused their injuries.
After a 2-month trial, jurors found that the Ultamet metal-on-metal version of the Pinnacle hips were defectively designed and that DePuy failed to warn patients about the risks. Jurors awarded about $130 million in total compensatory damages and about $360 million in punitive damages, said plaintiffs’ lead trial lawyer Mark Lanier. Read more
2. Toshiba deals medical biz to Canon for $5.9B as U.S. authorities launch accounting probe
Toshiba said yesterday that it inked a deal to sell its medical device business to Canon for $5.9 billion, as the U.S. Justice Dept. and the SEC probed the accounting practices in its U.S. businesses, and today said it plans to lay off an additional 3,000 workers.
Toshiba last week granted Canon exclusive negotiating rights to buy Toshiba Medical after a hotly contested auction. The ¥665.5 billion sale of Toshiba Medical Systems follows the February announcement that Toshiba would sell the entire medical equipment unit rather than just a controlling stake. A bidding war soon developed among a slew of private equity players and rival corporations. Toshiba has also said that it will either shut down or transfer all of its other healthcare businesses by the end of March. Read more
1. Analyst: Medtronic most likely to challenge Intuitive Surgical in robot-assisted surgery
Medtronic is the most likely rival to Intuitive Surgical‘s dominance in the robot-assisted surgery space, but is still at least a year away from putting a competing device on the market, according to 1 analyst covering the medical device industry.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Intuitive has a long lead, having had its flagship da Vinci system since 2000 and is still on a roll, introducing new systems and instruments and looking to expand into more surgical areas. Despite Medtronic and a spate of other potential entrants, “we remain of the mindset that it will be tough to derail da Vinci,” Newitter wrote from the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal & Endoscopic Surgeons in Boston. Read more