Varian finally gets some beads as Boston does a swap

Boston Scientific bought BTG last autumn for its embolic bead technologies – plain, drug-coated or radioactive microspheres designed to block the blood vessels supplying tumours – and after the FTC questioned the acquisition’s antitrust implications Boston has decided to sell its own bead technologies to close the deal. The buyer, for $90m in cash and debt, is Varian Medical Systems, which last year missed out on acquiring Sirtex Medical, another bead maker. The beads Varian is getting are those Boston had bought from Celonova in 2015 for $70m up front: Embozene, a bead with no payload, and the drug-loadable spheres Oncozene and Embozene Tandem. These bring in around $20m per year, Boston said. This pales in comparison with the BTG beads Boston is obtaining instead: BTG’s interventional oncology unit, which includes the Therasphere radiotherapy and LC-Bead and Bead Block technologies, had revenues of $156m in 2018. For its part, Varian’s strategy to get the most from its new devices could involve it going to China, where it says the interventional oncology market is growing at 18% annually. This company has been buying furiously lately, having done seven deals since the beginning of 2018.