Allergan Inc., the Irvine maker of Botox and other drugs, has a fan on investor website Seeking Alpha.
Blogger Gabriel Kaplan, who owns Allergan shares, said the company “appears to excel among its peers in areas where the rest of the healthcare industry is lacking.”
Those areas, according to Kaplan, include diversified products, drugs in development, “high internal R&D,” successful licensing and acquisitions, and the prospect of global expansion.
Allergan is an “improving growth story in areas such as anti-aging, obesity and vanity,” wrote Kaplan, who runs New York-based investment adviser Derastone LLC.
“There are not many areas to hide when the U.S. population is aging and fattening,” he said.
Along with Botox for temporarily easing upper face wrinkles, Allergan also makes products for filling in lower face wrinkles, lengthening eyelashes, enlarging breasts and treating obesity.
Kaplan also addressed some recent takeover speculation about Allergan, saying its “growth profile would be a nice fit within Big Pharma.”
Allergan’s stock surged last month when its name came up in speculation about French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis SA’s desire to buy an American company.
Then, in late July, Sanofi was reported to have made an initial $18 billion offer to buy Cambridge, Mass.-based Genzyme Corp., taking the speculation wind out of Allergan’s shares.
According to Kaplan, other potential suitors for Allergan include New Brunswick, N.J.-based Johnson & Johnson, Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline PLC or Novartis AG, a Swiss drug maker that formerly employed David Pyott, Allergan’s longtime chief executive.
Kaplan called Allergan flagship Botox “more sustainable than believed” and cited new uses for the drug, including a recent British approval and a pending U.S. approval for treating chronic migraines, which is gaining a lot of investor attention.
Botox also could get approval for an overactive bladder treatment in 2012, he said.
Still, Allergan has challenges, according to Kaplan.
The company faces an “uptake of competitive products” that could undermine some of its core drugs, according to Kaplan.
Those include Restasis for dry eye and eyelash grower Latisse, as well as what he said could be share gain by Botox competitors, particularly Dysport, which is sold by Scottsdale-based Medicis Pharmaceutical Corp.
ICU Device OK’d
ICU Medical Inc., a San Clemente medical device maker, received Food and Drug Administration approval for a new type of needleless connector for administering intravenous medicine and fluids.
The company’s Neutron neutral-pressure connector is designed to prevent blood from entering catheters. ICU said in a release that the use of Neutron may help hospitals address regulatory concerns about bloodstream infections from bacteria within catheters.
The FDA has ordered makers of connectors to study the safety of their devices in use at hospitals and other healthcare providers.
An issue of higher infection rates appears to stem from the design of needleless connectors, which are more complex than other connectors, according to a story on medical news website Medscape quoting William Jarvis, a doctor and infection control expert.
The complexities of the needless devices make them harder to disinfect, flush completely and use correctly, Jarvis said.
Bits and Pieces
The University of California and several other agencies launched the California Telehealth Network, which links clinics and hospitals in rural and urban areas in California with specialty medical care at major hospitals. A pair of UCI School of Medicine professors, Ira Lott and Gail Fernandez, participated in a demonstration as part of the launch. Separately, the university said it signed a deal with SonoSite Inc., a Bothell, Wash.-based medical device maker, to provide ultrasound visualization devices for medical students … Mission Viejo-based Auxilio Inc. signed a five-year contract with the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Health System to cut the use of paper as part of a partnership with Gaithersburg, Md.-based food and facilities management company Sodexo Inc., part of France’s Sodexo Group … The Newport Beach office of McCarthy Building Cos., a St. Louis construction company, is working on March LifeCare City, a $3.3 billion construction project in Riverside at the former March Air Force Reserve base. The project includes 6 million square feet of healthcare buildings, including a hospital, medical offices and buildings for specialized care such as skilled nursing and veteran care.
