A British medical device maker that has its U.S. headquarters in Irvine is seeking its fortune in the U.S.
Lombard Medical Inc., which is domiciled in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in the United Kingdom, recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $80 million in a public offering.
Lombard makes endovascular stent grafts to treat abdominal aortic aneurysms, or a ballooning of the body’s main artery. Aorfix, its lead device, has Food and Drug Administration approval.
The company wants to list its shares on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol EVAR. An offering date and price have not been set yet. Jefferies & Co. and Barclays are the main underwriters.
The offering differs from the one announced in October by business software maker Kofax PLC, which is publicly traded in London but maintains an Irvine headquarters. Kofax is planning to keep its London Stock Exchange premium listing and sell common stock on Nasdaq.
Lombard said in its filing that its wholly owned subsidiary, Lombard Medical Technologies PLC, trades on the AIM, a London-based stock exchange, and that it would “cancel the admission” of those shares on the AIM.
Its shares were up some 17% this year through Feb. 21. The company declined to comment on this story in the run-up to the offering (see related item on Irvine-based Presbia PLC’s planned IPO in Addendum, page 12).
Lombard said it would use the proceeds of the offering to double its domestic sales force and to develop a thoracic stent graft, among other things.
The company is unprofitable. It posted a net loss of $19.2 million in 2013―up from a $13.2 million net loss a year earlier―and said in its filing that it had an accumulated deficit of $160.7 million as of Dec. 31.
Revenue totaled about $7 million last year, up 13% from a year earlier. Aorfix revenue accounted for $6.1 million of that.
“We launched Aorfix commercially in the United States only in November 2013,” Lombard said in its filing, adding that the company’s U.S. marketing efforts would initially focus on doctors who treat abdominal aortic aneurysm patients at the top 300 hospitals where more than 50% of endovascular
aortic repair procedures are performed annually.
Domestic commercial rollout of Aorfix “is essential to our business strategy and our prospects would be significantly harmed if we are not successful in obtaining market share in the U.S. [endovascular aortic repair] market, the largest market worldwide for [abdominal aortic aneurysm] repair,” Lombard said.
More than 500,000 people are diagnosed with abdominal aortic aneurysms annually in the developed world, with 200,000 of such being treated, Lombard said in its filing.
The company also quoted figures from Vancouver-based market tracker iData Research Inc. showing that the market was around $680 million last year. Other companies making abdominal aortic aneurysm devices include Irvine-based Endologix Inc., and Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc., which has operations in Orange County.
“Our growth will depend upon an increasing percentage of patients with [abdominal aortic aneurysms] being diagnosed, and an increasing percentage of those diagnosed receiving [endovascular aortic repair] as opposed to an open surgical procedure,” Lombard said.
Lombard has 121 workers, 30 of whom are in Irvine. It leases a 4,182-square-foot building on 15420 Laguna Canyon Road.
It also said in its filing that its status as an “emerging growth company” under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups law would allow it to take advantage of certain exemptions under federal financial reporting
regulations. Such exceptions include the ability to include only two years of audited financial statements and limited management discussion on financial performance, Lombard said.
The company’s nonexecutive chairman, Raymond Cohen, is a familiar figure in Orange County medical device circles. His past includes overseeing the sale of Laguna Hills-based Vessix Vascular Inc. to Boston Scientific Corp. of Natick, Mass. for $125 million in 2012.
