Cardinal to Close Sale of PTS Segment This Month
Cardinal Health expects to close the sale of its Pharmaceutical Technologies and Services group to The Blackstone Group sometime this month, according to a Cardinal spokesperson. The PTS segment is a contract manufacturing and service provider for the pharmaceutical industry.
The PTS Group develops and manufactures oral and sterile medication in various dosage forms, and holds patents for softgel and Zydis fast-dissolve technologies. It is also a contract packager of pharmaceuticals.
“Cardinal decided for strategic reasons that they wanted to focus on providers of healthcare such as hospitals and pharmacies,” Troy Kirkpatrick, a Cardinal Health company spokesman, told CBAN this week. “The customers of the PTS division are the pharmaceutical companies. PTS is a great business; it’s just that it did not fit in with the new strategic framework.”
Cardinal announced in January that The Blackstone Group would buy the unit for approximately $3.3 billion in cash.
TTP LabTech Appoints New Distributors in the Far East and Pacific Rim
TTP LabTech this week appointed three new distributors. In Japan, it appointed AsOne Corp. in Osaka; in India, it appointed Wipro Ltd.’s Biomed Division in Bangalore; and in Australia and New Zealand, it appointed Millenium Science in Victoria.
The distribution agreements cover LabTech’s nanoliter liquid handler, mosquito, and the new microplate cytometer, Acumen X3. According to the company, these agreements follow the establishment of customer bases for these products in Europe and the US.
Berkeley Lab Scientists Develop Premalignant Breast Cells For Gene Target Evaluation, Identification
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory this week announced that they have established the first physiologically relevant and unbiased culture models of premalignant human breast cells. Berkeley Lab is seeking a commercial licensing partner for this technology.
The cells were derived from HMT-3522 human epithelial series (S2 cells) having a tumorigenic potential between nontumorigenic and malignant cells. They exhibit a loss of differentiation in 3D laminin-rich basement membrane, have the ability to invade through basement, but can acquire the potential to become invasive in the presence of conditioned medium from malignant cells.