Genyx Medical Inc., an Aliso Viejo-based medical device company, is being bought for $60 million by C.R. Bard Inc. of Murray Hill, N.J.
The sale of Genyx to Bard comes on the heels of Food and Drug Administration pre-market approval last month for the company’s Uryx device. The device uses a polymer that’s inserted into tissue surrounding a patient’s urethra to reduce or eliminate stress urinary incontinence.
The acquisition wasn’t a complete surprise. Bard had bought the rights to acquire Genyx in 2003. At the time, Genyx was in the final stages of a clinical trial and hadn’t filed its pre-market approval with the FDA.
Genyx is a venture-backed company that was spun out of Micro Therapeutics Inc., an Irvine-based company that developed the expandable polymer technology, called Embolyx, for neurological uses.
Micro Therapeutics hoped to use the technology “in areas other than the brain,” said Thomas Berryman, Micro Therapeutics’ chief financial officer at the time.
Berryman eventually decided to recast the technology himself. He went before Micro Therapeutics’ board, which gave him its blessing to start Genyx in return for a stake in the company.
Genyx was established with a sale in mind, said Berryman, the company’s chief executive.
“It was highly unlikely that this was going to become an IPO kind of company,” he said.
There are just a handful of companies operating in the urology area that Genyx is in, Berryman said, so Genyx knew of its likely acquirers. Bard, Boston Scientific Corp. of Natick, Mass., the Gynecare unit of New Brunswick, N.J.-based Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon Inc. division and American Medical Systems Holdings Inc. of Minneapolis are in the niche.
Stress urinary incontinence afflicts some 50 million people worldwide, 85% of whom are women, according to Bard.
“For years Bard has demonstrated its leadership in the area of female stress incontinence, and we wish them great success as we transfer Uryx and all the Genyx technology over to them, and they prepare for national and international product launch,” Berryman said.
Genyx counts seven workers, down from a high of 11 at one time. The remaining Genyx employees are set to do about two months of work for Bard in Aliso Viejo, Berryman said.
After that, Uryx either will be folded into Bard’s urology division in Covington, Ga., or moved to Bard’s plant in Puerto Rico.
“All of us will go our separate ways,” Berryman said. “Personally, I’m going to take a little sabbatical.”
Berryman is the former chief financial officer of VLI Corp., an Irvine company that developed the Today contraceptive sponge in the 1980s.
Berryman said most of Genyx’s workers are veterans of other startups, and he expects that the team might come together to launch another venture.
Genyx raised $10.4 million in venture capital as a private company. Genyx’s investors included Pequot Ventures, a firm with offices in Menlo Park, New York City, Wellesley, Mass., and Westport, Conn., along with Brentwood Venture Capital, which has offices in Menlo Park and Los Angeles.
William Link, a Brentwood healthcare partner and cofounder of Versant Ventures, which has a Newport Beach office, is a Genyx board member. Brentwood led Genyx’s $3 million original round of venture capital in 1998.
Bard, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, is a developer of medical devices for the vascular, urology, oncology and surgical specialty markets. It counts yearly sales of about $1.5 billion and a recent market value of nearly $7 billion.
