Lake Region Medical, a privately held contract research organization for medical device companies, just got gobbled up by Greatbatch — a big fish in the medtech CRO world. The deal’s worth a whopping $1.73 billion.
This merger will create one of the largest medical device-focused CROs in the world, with some 9,000 employees. As a frame of reference, Quintiles — one of the world’s largest CROs in the life sciences space, has 10,400 employees. Indeed, the rampant M&A activity in the life sciences industry has led to a mass swelling of the larger medtech companies, as the smaller players get routinely acquired.
Some of the large medtech deals of late: Medtronic’s $50 billion acquisition of Covidien; Zimmer Holdings purchasing orthopedics implant maker Biomet for $14 billion, and St. Jude Medical’s $3.4 billion acquisition of heart pump maker Thoratec.
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However, as Greatbatch CEO Thomas Hook tells Reuters, it’ll still hold only 10 to 12 percent of a highly fragmented industry.
The Texas-based Greatbatch was founded in 1970 by Wilson Greatbatch, who helped invent the world’s first successfully implanted pacemaker. The company was started to build batteries that had a long enough life to power these devices.
Since then, however, it has entered the fields of neuromodulation and orthopedic device development and manufacturing.
[PHOTO: Big Stock Photo]