Medtronic Inc., which has about 700 employees in Orange County, recently detailed a management team and restructured its business segments in the run-up to its proposed $42.9 billion buy of fellow device maker Covidien PLC, which has 670 local workers.
No OC-based executives are part of the top four at the newly combined company.
Minneapolis-based Medtronic said the combined business would be divided into four major groups: Cardiac and Vascular; Diabetes; Restorative Therapies; and the Covidien Group.
Covidien’s neurovascular unit, which is in the Irvine Spectrum, is going to be integrated into Restorative Therapies as an independent business. Its neurovascular business makes products such as the Pipeline, which restores natural blood flow past wide-neck brain aneurysms, and the Alligator, which retrieves foreign bodies from arteries in the brain.
Medtronic’s “center of excellence” for tissue heart valves is in Santa Ana. The company competes with Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Corp. in the surgical and less-invasive replacement valve markets with lines such as Hancock II, Contegra, Mosaic and Medtronic CoreValve.
Medtronic said in a news release that more details about the restructuring would come later.
It sought Covidien, which is based in Ireland and operates from Massachusetts, in order to lower its corporate tax rate. Such “inversion” deals are popular among companies because the business tax rate in Ireland is 12%, compared to the 35% rate in the U.S.
Inversions, however, have proven unpopular with politicians, and the U.S. Treasury recently announced regulatory changes that would make such deals more difficult.
Avanir Proceeds With Drug Development
A late-stage clinical trial showed Aliso Viejo-based Avanir Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s AVP-825 drug-and-device treatment for migraine headaches, which delivers treatment deep into nasal cavities, achieved relief in as few as 30 minutes and sustained it for as long as 48 hours compared to a placebo, according to industry newsletter Science Business.
Avanir licensed the drug-delivery technology last year from Pennsylvania-based OptiNose USA Inc. AVP-825 delivers sumatriptan, which is a widely used migraine drug, in a powder form. It’s designed to bypass a problem often found with sumatriptan pills—the fact that the pill is absorbed in the stomach, which delays and impedes reaching the areas of the brain where the drug is needed.
It has a piece that fits into the patient’s nostril and another piece that goes in the mouth.
Avanir said in a statement that it submitted a new drug application for AVP-825 to the Food and Drug Administration, which has set a Nov. 26 target date for completing the review.
Alzheimer’s Test Study On
NanoSomiX Inc., an Aliso Viejo-based maker of diagnostic tests, said it would be developing a blood-based assay for testing the brain’s resistance to insulin in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
A clinical study published last month in a journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology showed that the test could accurately reflect development of Alzheimer’s disease up to 10 years prior to clinical onset.
NanoSomiX Chief Executive John Osth said in a news release that the new test “further strengthens” the company’s portfolio of blood-based biomarker tests for Alzheimer’s disease.
“We believe our assays will prove instrumental in identifying early stage [Alzheimer’s disease] patients for entry in clinical trials and thereby help to enrich the study population,” he said.
Firm to Open Chinese Facility
Irvine Pharmaceutical Services Inc. said late last month that it will open an operation in Hangzhou, China.
The Irvine-based company is what’s known as a contract research organization. Such groups specialize in developing and making small lots of drugs that customers want to submit to the FDA.
Irvine Pharmaceutical’s new facility has 115,000 square feet of space and will be fully operational in next year’s first quarter. The company said it is its first entry into the Asian market.
Bits & Pieces
UC Irvine Health said it received an “A” grade in the Leapfrog Group’s fall 2014 hospital safety score survey. The survey rates how well hospitals protect their patients from errors, injuries and infections. … Aubrey Group Inc., an Irvine design and engineering firm that develops products for medical device and biotech companies, is now known as Sparton Corp. Sparton bought Aubrey in March for an undisclosed price.
