St. Jude Medical in talks to buy smaller rival Thoratec Corp

US heart device maker St. Jude Medical Inc is in talks to buy smaller rival Thoratec Corp, Bloomberg yesterday reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

No final deal has been agreed and Thoratec, which currently has a market cap of $2.65 billion, could also seek a different buyer, the report said.

Thoratec's stock rose 27 per cent to a record high of $62.05 yesterday on the Nasdaq.

Thoratec has the broadest product portfolio to treat advanced heart failure patients. Its products include the HeartMate LVAS and Thoratec VAD, with more than 20,000 devices implanted in patients suffering from heart failure.

The California-based company also manufactures and markets the CentriMag and PediMag / PediVAS product lines.

Its facilities are located in Burlington, Massachusetts; Rancho Cordova, Sunnyvale California; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the UK; and Zurich, Switzerland.

Founded in 1976 and based in St. Paul, Minnesota, St Jude Medical, which is named after Jude the Apostle, is a medical device company focused on six key treatment areas - heart failure, arrhythmias, vascular disease, structural heart, chronic pain, and neurological diseases.

It manufactures implantable cardioverter-defibrillators. Pacemakers, electrophysiology catheters; vascular closure products; cardiac mapping and visualization systems, optical coherence tomography imaging systems; structural heart repair products, and neurostimulation devices.

It has more than 20 operations and manufacturing facilities worldwide and its products are sold in more than 100 countries and its major markets include the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. 

With a market cap of $22 billion St. Jude Medical is a Fortune 500 company and has annual sales of $5.6 billion.