MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Valeant Pharmaceuticals and its hedge fund partner, Pershing Square Capital Management, asked Allergan (NYSE:AGN) shareholders today to oust Allergan’s board and replace it with a slate of its own directors.

Valeant and Pershing want to convene a special meeting of Allergan shareholders to consider revising the board and accepting its $53 billion hostile takeover bid, according to a regulatory filing. The would-be acquirers want AGN stockowners to remove Dr. Deborah Dunshire, Michael Gallagher, Trevor Jones, Louis Lavigne Jr., Russell Ray and Henri Termeer, according to the filing.

Their nominees for replacing those directors are Baja LLC CEO Betsy Atkins; venture capital advisor Cathleen Black; healthcare VC, Fredric Eshelman; private equity player Steven Shulman; ex-Ernst & Young executive David Wilson; and John Zillmer, formerly an executive with chemical company Univar, Pershing Square said.

"Under the current board’s leadership, which includes individuals with significantly more industry experience than Pershing Square’s nominees, Allergan continues to execute on its plan to drive long-term organic growth, enhance its growth prospects and generate significant value for all of Allergan’s stockholders," an Allergan company spokesman said today in prepared remarks. "We believe today’s announcement is a further attempt by co-bidders Pershing Square and Valeant to acquire Allergan at a grossly inadequate price that substantially undervalues the company and creates significant risks and uncertainties for Allergan stockholders. Today’s announcement also fails to address the serious concerns raised by Allergan and important members of the investment community about Valeant’s anemic organic growth driven by unsustainable price increases, among other fundamental business model issues."

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Google (NSDQ:GOOG) founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page came off sounding lukewarm at best about the tech giant’s future in healthcare during a CEO summit over the weekend:

"Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs," Brin said.

"I am really excited about the possibility of data also, to improve health. But that’s – I think what Sergey’s saying, it’s so heavily regulated. It’s a difficult area," Page added. I can give you an example. Imagine you had the ability to search people’s medical records in the U.S.. Any medical researcher can do it. Maybe they have the names removed. Maybe when the medical researcher searches your data, you get to see which researcher searched it and why. I imagine that would save 10,000 lives in the first year. Just that. That’s almost impossible to do because of HIPAA. I do worry that we regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities that are certainly on the data-mining end."
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Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) CEO Omar Ishrak’s decision to spend $43 billion acquiring Covidien (NYSE:COV) shows that he’s making all the right moves in adapting the world’s largest pure-play medical device maker to the changing healthcare landscape, argues MDDI’s Shana Leonard.
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NuVasive Inc. (NSDQ:NUVA) is hiring 30 workers for its new international operations center in Waterford, Ireland.
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Life Recovery Systems said the FDA approved a pair of investigational device exemptions for its ThermoSuit therapeutic hypothermia system in the treatment of heart attack and ischemic stroke. 
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