Medical device company financing brought in $977 million, a decrease over Q1’s $1.1 billion. Device acquisition activity was up to $4.6 billion, yet only one deal surpassed the billion-dollar mark. With late-stage financing again leading, diagnostics funding together brought in $336 million, an 11% increase over Q1. For the first time since Q1 2011, the diagnostics M&A dollar total moved up instead of down, with $7 billion in acquisitions and five of the seven transactions topping $100 million.

Forest paid Janssen $357 million to acquire US and Canadian IP related to Bystolic. Nestle bought Pfizer’s nutritional’s business and Hologic beefed up its women’s health portfolio through its $3.8 billion Gen-Probe takeover. Both biopharma and medical device financing were down in April compared with last month.

The Dealmaking column is a survey of recent transactions, including strategic alliances, mergers & acquisitions, and financings, in the life sciences industries. Deals are listed by the following industry sectors: in vitro diagnostics, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and research/analytical instrumentation and reagents. All transactions are excerpted from Elsevier's Strategic Transactions database, providing comprehensive transaction coverage from 1991 to the present.

In under a year and a half, Viasys has transformed itself from a collection of 14 independent device companies to an integrated public company operating in four segments of the hospital market: respiratory, critical care, neurocare, and medical/surgical devices. As the successor to the companies that formerly made up the Thermo Biomedical division of Thermo Electron, it starts out with some unique challenges. It's already a public company with almost $400 million in revenues, so it has to be ever mindful of investors' expectations for growth. But it's virtually a start-up in terms of creating a corporate infrastructure and processes. Perhaps the greatest inherited weakness of Viasys is a lack of product-planning skills; Thermo Biomedical hadn't introduced a new product in seven years. Now Viasys must fill pipeline gaps with products that will appeal to its cost-conscious hospital constituency but still yield higher margins. Its middling size adds to the challenge; it's not big enough to afford a product failure, nor can it compete where financial might and product breadth are advantages. But Viasys believes it can handily apply the speed and maneuverability of a small firm to manufacture and market a large company-style product portfolio.