Haemonetics Corporation, a global healthcare company dedicated to providing innovative blood management solutions for customers, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the business assets of Hemerus Medical, LLC, a Minnesota-based company that develops innovative technologies for the collection of whole blood, and processing and storage of blood components.
Brian Concannon, president and CEO, explained, “We've discussed our plans to deliver our first whole blood automation software package to customers and also to advance our automated whole blood collection device into clinical trials. The acquisition of the blood collection, filtration and processing product lines of Pall Corporation and the addition of Hemerus' SOLX collection system to this portfolio will considerably enhance our ability to serve the industry with complete and integrated solutions for whole blood collection.”
Under terms of the agreement, Haemonetics will pay up to $27 million in several stages, each of which is contingent upon successful regulatory approvals of SOLX. Additionally, Haemonetics has agreed to pay a royalty on future sales of SOLX based products. The acquisition is expected to close during the second quarter of fiscal 2013.
Hemerus has also completed phase III clinical trials and has submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) to the FDA for its unique, patented SOLX whole blood collection system.
This system's features include a collection set and a storage solution that is believed to considerably extend the quality and effective life of red blood cells. Hemerus expects FDA approval in calendar year 2012. The storage solution is the result of research partially funded by the US Army, and invented by Dr John Hess of the University of Maryland, and the late Dr Tibor Greenwalt of the University of Cincinnati. Hemerus holds the exclusive worldwide license to the intellectual property and furthered this research through the development of a whole blood collection set and clinical trials.
Concannon said, “Hemerus' capabilities complement our planned entry into the whole blood collection market with our differentiated products designed to bring greater efficiency and productivity to whole blood collection and processing. This is a market that is strategically important with more than 60 million collection procedures annually. Delivery of a superior blood storage solution offers both medical and economic benefits to our blood center and hospital customers and is important to our leadership position in blood management.”
Haemonetics' current broad product offering includes automated blood collection and separation technologies for the red blood cell collection process. However, today manual whole blood collections account for over 90 per cent of red cell collection procedures performed annually worldwide. Hemerus' capabilities are expected to enable Haemonetics to accelerate its entry into the whole blood collection market with differentiated offerings.