In the midst of leading Advanced Medical Optics Inc.’s sale to Abbott Laboratories, Chief Executive Jim Mazzo has promised to stay part of Orange County’s business landscape.
Advanced Medical, a Santa Ana maker of eye surgery devices for vision correction and cataracts as well as contact lens solutions, is being bought for $2.8 billion by Abbott. Once the deal closes, expected at the end of the first quarter, Mazzo will stay on and run the business as an Abbott senior vice president as well as Advanced Medical’s president.
Mazzo’s role is “not going to change at all,” he said.
The veteran executive has spent many years working with educational institutions, including University of California, Irvine, and Chapman University. His ties to UC Irvine run deep: he is a member of the UCI Foundation board, belongs to the university’s Chief Executive Roundtable and heads up a capital campaign for the Gavin Herbert eye institute on campus.
Mazzo is a trustee at Chapman and at the University of San Diego, where his son attends and his daughter is an alumna. His wife, Kelly, also has heavy civic involvement.
“One of the things I liked about Abbott is that it’s one of the best companies to work for, not only because of how it handles its employees, but its culture externally and its support of the external communities where it employs,” Mazzo said.
As an example, the Abbott Fund, Abbott’s philanthropic foundation, invested more than $385 million in grants and product donations in 2007, the last year for which statistics are available.
Medtronic Buying Device Maker
Medtronic Inc., a medical device maker with 550 workers at its Santa Ana heart valve plant, said it is buying Ablation Frontiers Inc., which is just over the county line in Carlsbad. Medtronic is paying $225 million, plus potential milestone payments, for Ablation Frontiers.
Ablation Frontiers makes devices to treat atrial fibrillation,the most common form of an irregular heartbeat. Medtronic said in a release that it’s buying Ablation Frontiers in order to add it to a newly formed business unit, AF Solutions.
Medtronic has made other deals to build the unit up, including paying $380 million for CryoCath Technologies Inc., a Montreal-based company that makes devices that use cryoablation,a minimally invasive process to freeze and destroy diseased tissues,to treat an irregular heartbeat.
Ablation Frontiers was founded in 2004; its financial backers include Versant Ventures, which has an office in Newport Beach. Its chief executive, Keegan Harper, is a serial entrepreneur who also founded a pair of San Clemente-based medical device makers: Rox Medical Inc. and Cameron Health Inc.
Made in Canada
Alpine Biomed Corp., a privately held diagnostic device maker based in Fountain Valley, has bought Stellate Systems Inc. of Montreal. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
Alpine makes devices for diagnosing acid reflux disease, as well as for neurological problems such as sleep disorders. Stellate designs, makes and distributes neurodiagnostic systems to hospitals, clinics and universities in more than 30 countries.
In a statement, Alpine said that buying Stellate gives it “a strong foothold in the rapidly growing sleep diagnostics market.”
Alpine said that the Stellate deal is the second it’s completed since Water Street Healthcare Partners LLC, a Chicago-based private equity firm with more than $1 billion under management, invested in it back in 2007. Alpine bought a neurodiagnostic product line from Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc. shortly after Water Street invested in it.
TriZetto Picks Up HMO
The TriZetto Group Inc., a Newport Beach-based healthcare information technology company, said it signed a five-year contract with Neighborhood Health Plan Inc., a Boston-based HMO with more than 185,000 members. TriZetto didn’t disclose the contract’s value.
The deal calls for TriZetto to provide software application hosting services and systems to Neighborhood Health. TriZetto said that Neighborhood Health has been using one of its products for automating medical claims, membership enrollment and billing, and the new deal adds Clinical CareAdvance, a disease management software program.
TriZetto now is privately held. Last year New York-based Apax Partners LLP bought TriZetto in a $1.4 billion deal.
Bits and Pieces:
Monarch HealthCare, an Irvine-based group medical practice that serves more than 180,000 patients in OC, is working with Nifty after Fifty, a Garden Grove-based senior fitness and wellness chain, to open five wellness centers in OC MedAvant Healthcare Solutions, a Santa Ana-based provider of electronic data processing for healthcare providers and payers, said it bought Qwik+Cross, an Omaha, Neb.-based processor of Medicare supplemental insurance claims. A purchase price wasn’t disclosed.
