Cook Medical recently announced it is selling its lead management portfolio to Merit Medical. Cook Medical is a medical device manufacturer with a portfolio of products used in lead management procedures, including for patients who need a pacemaker or an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator lead removed or replaced. Merit Medical is a manufacturer of disposable medical devices and has products used in interventional, diagnostic, and therapeutic procedures, including in the fields of cardiology, critical care, endoscopy, oncology, and radiology.
The agreed purchase price of Cook Medical’s lead management portfolio is $210 million. Merit estimates that the lead management portfolio assets being purchased generated about $37 million last year. The deal is expected to close later this year.
According to Merit’s CEO Fred P. Lampropoulos, the deal with Cook Medical “is consistent with our Continued Growth Initiatives (CGI) and positions Merit to offer clinicians an increasingly comprehensive set of solutions to support cardiac intervention patients, from diagnosis, to therapy and intervention, to post-procedure care.” Indeed, this year alone, Merit purchased EndoGastric Solutions’ EsopyX Z+ treatment for gastroesophageal reflux disease for $105 million, and acquired Ka Medical (a manufacturer of electromedical and electrotherapeutic devices) for $14.4 million.
While Merit has been acquiring, Cook has been divesting. Cook announced that its deal with Merit “is the conclusion of a series of planned Cook divestures across multiple product lines and specialties to align with Cook’s more focused vision for the future of the company.” In the 10 months prior to this agreement, Cook Medical made three separate deals to divest various other assets, including (1) ear, nose and throat devices, (2) its reproductive health business, and (3) obstetrics, doppler monitoring, and gynecology surgery products.
