St. Jude Medical To Acquire NeuroTherm For $200 Million, Enter RFA Market

By Joel Lindsey

St. Jude Medical recently announced a definite agreement to purchase NeuroTherm, a medical device company that manufactures interventional pain management technologies.

According to a recent press release, St. Jude Medical has agreed to purchase NeuroTherm for approximately $200 million in cash. St. Jude expects to finalize the acquisition by the end of the third quarter of this year.

With the acquisition of NeuroTherm, St. Jude Medical hopes to expand its range of pain treatment devices, adding radio frequency ablation (RFA) devices to its other pain treatment therapies.

RFA is a minimally invasive approach for treating back pain in which energy is directed to very particular points of the spine in order to interrupt pain signals. The heat generated by the therapy destroys the painful nerve or nerves, and in many cases it can help provide an effective way to manage and treat back pain — especially early on in a patient’s pain continuum.

“NeuroTherm’s radiofrequency ablation products are an ideal complement to St. Jude Medical’s chronic pain portfolio, providing our global sales force with additional interventional pain therapies that offer potential relief to patients earlier in the chronic pain continuum,” Michael T. Rousseau, chief operating officer at St. Jude Medical, said in the press release. “As the only medical device manufacturer with both RFA and spinal cord stimulation, this acquisition will enable us to offer more treatment options to patients worldwide who suffer from the debilitating effects of chronic pain.”

NeuroTherm’s multi-lesion RF generator, the company’s flagship technology, allows real-time temperature monitoring and control. The device also enables the continuous delivery of energy to target sites in order to maximize treatment at each spinal nerve.

“St. Jude Medical’s global leadership in chronic pain represents an excellent opportunity to bring NeuroTherm’s RF ablation technologies to more pain specialists and patients,” said NeuroTherm president and CEO Christopher R. von Jako in the press release. “We see a promising future with St. Jude Medical that combines our products with a leading pain franchise and further develops the underpenetrated global market for chronic pain.”