Boston drops $108m on Veniti project

Boston Scientific has stuck to the plan. Discussing the group’s second-quarter results, management said that its corporate investment strategy was often a means of teeing up takeovers, and so it has proved with Veniti. The venous stent developer was the recipient of $25m of venture cash from Boston in 2016, and has now been bought outright, with Boston paying $108m up-front for the 75% it doesn’t already own. A further $52m will follow should Veniti’s stent Vici, designed to treat venous obstructive disease, get FDA approval; a PMA submission was made in June. Presumably Boston has seen the full dataset from the approval trial of Vici. Called Virtus, the 200-patient study was scheduled to finish at the end of last year, but Veniti has not publicly released the full results. An interim look at the first 30 patients in the feasibility phase of Virtus showed primary, assisted-primary, and secondary patency rates at 12 months of 93%, 96%, and 100%, respectively; one-year primary patency rate was the trial’s primary efficacy endpoint.