Argon puts $362.5M on Angiotech's interventionals biz

Angiotech Pharmaceuticals is getting out of the interventional devices business, agreeing to offload the unit to Argon Medical Devices for $362.5 million.

Through the deal, Argon gets a business that raked in $101.6 million in sales last year through a line of biopsy devices and drainage catheters. Angiotech is hanging on to its surgical products and royalty licensing business, which reported about $138.2 million in revenue in 2012, the company said.

The sale and resultant restructuring hinges on shareholder approval, which Angiotech expects to win by the end of April. Once the deal is done, the company will have the cash to pay down all of its remaining debt obligations, CEO Thomas Bailey said, and leave enough on hand to invest in Angiotech's remaining businesses. The company filed for bankruptcy protection back in 2011 and has been crawling its way back to revenue growth ever since.

"This event represents a culmination of turnaround efforts we initiated upon concluding our 2011 restructuring, and is a direct result of the exceptional and improved business results our teams were able to achieve in 2012," Bailey said.

After the sale, Angiotech will cease to be a voluntary reporting public issuer, meaning it'll stop filing its financials with the SEC after reporting 2012 results on March 31.

Argon, a portfolio company of RoundTable Healthcare Partners, can significantly boost its interventional offerings through the deal, adding on to its Option Retrievable Inferior Vena Cava Filter, Cleaner15 Rotational Thrombectomy System and UltraStream Chronic Dialysis Catheter.

- read the announcement