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| Exhaling into the Niox Mino--Courtesy of Aerocrine |
Clinical stage allergy player Circassia Pharmaceuticals, which had a huge $332 million IPO on the London Stock Exchange last year, will scoop up Swedish asthma company Aerocrine or SEK 1.78 billion ($214.3 million) after it got its latest asthma diagnostic device cleared by the FDA in November.
It's also buying specialty inhaled respiratory company Prosonix for up to £100 million ($157.4 million). To pull off both deals at once, Circassia is raising additional cash via a £275 million ($432 million) private placement.
Aerocrine launched its next-gen Niox Vero in the U.S. during the first quarter. And the FDA also cleared a wireless Bluetooth enhancement for the device, which is intended to be used in a physician's office to test patients routinely to determine asthma diagnosis and treatment. The company hopes to target asthma specialists as well as primary care physicians. It is cleared in Japan and CE-marked in the EU.
In fact in April 2014, the often skeptical U.K. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended the use of Niox Mino and Niox Vero to diagnose and manage asthma in adults and children.
The Niox Vero is a small, point-of-care device that gives a patient's FeNO score in about one minute after a 10-second exhalation. It improves upon the previous version, Niox Mino, by including a rechargeable battery and a visual display to encourage a complete, successful exhalation. The test is designed to detect objectively measure allergic airway inflammation, which the company noted it the leading cause of asthma symptoms.
Circassia hopes the pair of deals will make it a "self-sustaining specialty biopharmaceutical company focused on allergy and asthma," said Circassia CEO Steve Harris in a statement. Prosonix is a drug delivery play that makes inhaled versions of generic and novel respiratory drugs.
"We believe Aerocrine's established commercial infrastructure, which is already targeting our core potential customers in key markets, will optimise the launch of Cat-SPIRE, which is the first of our next generation allergy immunotherapies, and which remains on track to report pivotal phase III results in H1 2016," added Harris.
In the first quarter, Aerocrine had SEK 53.2 million ($6.4 million) in net sales driven by 310 installations of its Niox Vero in the U.S. to replace a prior model of an earlier Aerocrine device. It also sold 732,000 tests to be used on the Niox Vero.
The Aerocrine offer is at a 92% premium to the three-month, volume-weighted average share price prior to April 22. The offer acceptance period will start on May 19 and expire on June 11. Aerocrine shareholders Novo A/S and Investor AB, who between them hold about half of the company's shares, have both agreed to the Circassia offer.
- here are the Aerocrine and Circassia statements
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