A New York hedge fund has upped its stake in Santa Ana’s Advanced Medical Optics Inc., a maker of eye surgery devices and contact lens solutions.
Tremblant Capital Group now holds a 5% stake in Advanced Medical, the hedge fund operator said in a filing last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It owns 3.15 million shares.
Tremblant previously said in a SEC filing that it owned 2.7 million shares of Advanced Medical, along with calls on the company’s stock that would allow it to buy 329,400 shares in the future.
Tremblant also recently disclosed a stake in PharmaNet Development Group Inc., a drug development service company of Princeton, N.J.
Bret Barakett founded Tremblant in 2001. He runs the hedge fund, which has about $4 billion under management.
Barakett, before coming to Tremblant, worked at Moore Capital Management, a fund run by financial veteran Louis Bacon.
Barakett’s brother, Timothy, is the founder of Atticus Capital LLC, a $14 billion hedge fund that was rumored to be liquidating after its two main funds suffered huge losses, according to the New York Post.
Advanced Medical (see related story, page 1) has seen its stock fall more than 80% this year with a recent market value of $250 million.
The company counts another hedge fund investor.
Last year ValueAct Capital Partners LP, a San Francisco hedge fund that owns 8.2 million shares or about 13% of Advanced Medical as of Oct. 15, emerged as a major hurdle to Advanced Medical’s attempt to buy rival Bausch & Lomb Inc. for $4.2 billion.
ValueAct’s managing partner, Jeffrey Ubben, and the fund came out strongly against that deal. In July 2007, the hedge fund contended that a deal would expose Advanced Medical to “unnecessary risk” and raised doubts about the company’s ability to integrate Bausch.
ValueAct even went as far as to say that Advanced Medical’s bid for Bausch was “dead” and that several other large shareholders opposed it.
Advanced Medical eventually walked away from the Bausch deal. Bausch’s board accepted a $3.67 billion bid to go private from Warburg Pincus LLC, a New York private equity firm.
Advanced Medical added G. Mason Morfit, a ValueAct partner, to its board in November.
Glaxo Marketing Valeant Drug
Aliso Viejo-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals International said last month that GlaxoSmithKline PLC is going to market Val-eant’s Diastat AcuDial seizure drug in the U.S.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
GlaxoSmithKline will market Diastat AcuDial to doctors in 2009 with an option to extend the deal. Valeant will record the drug’s revenue and be responsible for product development and brand strategy, according to the company.
Diastat AcuDial is used for what’s called breakthrough seizures, or seizures among patients who already are on epilepsy medication. Diastat AcuDial accounted for $12.1 million in revenue for Valeant in 2007, unchanged from the previous year.
Valeant also has a deal with GlaxoSmithKline for retigabine, an epilepsy drug candidate that’s in late-stage clinical trials. Valeant received a $125 million payment earlier this month from GlaxoSmithKline for retigabine.
Valeant could receive up to $825 million in that earlier deal, which also includes VRX698, another drug candidate.
GlaxoSmithKline is where several former Valeant executives and managers hail from, including Timothy Tyson, who served as chief executive from 2005 until February of this year, and Wesley Wheeler, who served as president of North America and research and development until leaving at the end of last year to run Patheon Inc., a drug maker in Canada.
Bits and Pieces:
The University of California, Irvine, started construction on a $66.6 million stem cell research building. The four-story, 100,636-square-foot building is set for completion in 2010. It will house the UC Irvine Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center, a stem cell techniques course, a master’s program in biotechnology with an emphasis on stem cell research and programs and activities for patients and public education Avid Bioservices Inc., a subsidiary of Tustin drug maker Peregrine Pharmaceuticals Inc., said it signed a deal to make clinical-grade material for Catalyst Biosciences Inc., a South San Francisco company that’s working on a drug to treat acute bleeding in people with hemophilia. Separately, Peregrine said that 71% of evaluable patients in a first-stage clinical trial for its bavituximab breast cancer treatment in combination with another drug saw reductions in their tumors CoreValve Inc., an Ir-vine company that’s developing a less-invasive replacement heart valve, said that more than 1,800 high-risk patients have been treated with its ReValving system in an expanded clinical evaluation Greater Newport Physicians and Edinger Medical Group said they were ranked in the top 20% of California medical groups by the Integrated Healthcare Association, a trade group. The rankings are based on meeting clinical quality measures, patient satisfaction and use of information technology to support safer healthcare.
