Nearly a year after bagging the option to acquire Millipede, Boston Scientific has pulled the trigger. When the pair inked the agreement in January, Boston Scientific handed over $90 million for a portion of the mitral regurgitation startup’s shares. Now, the devicemaker is paying $325 million to pick up the rest of Millipede’s shares.
The deal was structured so that either company could trigger the option by the end of 2019. Boston Scientific could choose to fork over $325 million and commit to pay a $125 million commercial milestone to buy up Millipede at any time before it finishes a clinical trial. Alternatively, after completing that trial, Millipede could have compelled Boston Scientific to acquire it.
The acquisition will add Millipede’s IRIS Transcatheter Annuloplasty Ring System to Boston Scientific’s structural heart unit. The device is being developed to treat patients with severe mitral regurgitation—a condition characterized by blood flowing the wrong way in the heart—who are not candidates for open-heart surgery. The ring is delivered using a transcatheter procedure.
RELATED: Boston Scientific bags option on mitral regurgitation startup in $540M deal
"Upon commercialization, we believe the IRIS system can meet the needs of a currently underserved patient population that requires physiological, less invasive options to treat functional mitral regurgitation in patients with progressive heart failure," said Boston Scientific Chief Medical Officer Ian Meredith, M.D., Ph.D., in the statement. "This device is designed to be highly customizable to a specific patient's mitral anatomy and disease state, and is repositionable and retrievable to promote a high-quality outcome."
RELATED: Special Report—The top 10 medtech companies of 2024—Boston Scientific
Boston Scientific expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2019. It is just the latest in a string of acquisitions to which CEO Patrick Mahoney alluded in a February 2018 earnings call. Since that call, Boston Scientific has bought up Cryterion, which makes cardiac cryoablation devices, for $202 million upfront, and Claret Medical and its neurovascular brain-protection system for $220 million upfront. More recently, it agreed to acquire BTG for $4.2 billion in cash.