Boston Scientific announced Wednesday that it is acquiring Cosman Medical, which makes radiofrequency ablation systems to treat chronic pain, for an undisclosed sum.
The Burlington, Massachusetts, company and its products — which include RF generators, electrodes, cannulae, among others — will become part of Boston Scientific’s neuromodulation business. Therapies that offer neuromodulation use electric pulses to disrupt signals from the brain. In RF ablation, heat is used to target a certain area of nerve tissue to interrupt pain signals.
Boston Scientific’s neuromodulation unit is one of its smallest businesses and garnered $121 million in revenue in the first quarter of this year, up from $114 million in the same, year-ago period. The unit makes spinal cord stimulators to treat pain and deep brain stimulation systems to manage Parkinson’s, dystonia and essential tremor.
In bringing Cosman Medical, founded in 2000 into its fold, Boston will be drawing on a private company with roots going back decades. Bernard Cosman founded Radionics in 1938 and sold the family business back in 2000, the same year his son founded Cosman Medical.
The products made by Cosman Medical have been used in neurosurgery and pain management.
The medtech industry has been developing a device approach to managing pain for several decades. And now may be the time that neuromodulation and RF ablation as an alternative to drug therapy, gain further ground.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The news release from Boston Scientific, unsurprisingly, took note of the current opioid crisis in the nation emerging from a need to manage chronic pain.
“This acquisition comes at a time when our society is recognizing the impact of relying extensively on opioids to treat pain and is looking for additional approaches,” said Eric Cosman Jr., scientific director of Cosman Medical.
A market research report published in October 2015 projected that the devices pain management market, will grow to $3.5 billion in 2020, up from $3.1 million last year.
“The number of pain management devices available is also expected to increase as device technology evolves. As new technologies are introduced with additional features that focus on patient use, safety and modes of operation to provide increased analgesic effect, the market is poised for healthy growth,” said Melissa Elder, an analyst with BCC Research that published the report, in a statement. “Manufacturers of pain devices aimed at alternate sites and developers of outpatient pain device products will experience healthy growth due to the current cost-conscious environment.”
