HealthSport Acquires Edible Film Strip Maker InnoZen

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Woodland Hills edible film strips maker InnoZen Inc. has been acquired by a New York company in a restricted stock deal worth about $40 million.

The angel investors and original owners of InnoZen, a developer of the technology for delivery of medicine and nutritional supplements, have been bought out by HealthSport Inc. which is based in Amherst, N.Y. HealthSport is a customer of InnoZen’s technology and the two companies jointly developed and are marketing an electrolyte strip called Enlyten SportStrips.

InnoZen, a spin-off from drug developer Zengen Inc., was the first company to deliver an active drug ingredient with its Chloraseptic Sore Throat Relief Strips in 2003. It also offers over-the-counter cough care and other medications through its Supress brand.

Its specialized laboratory and manufacturing facilities are expected to remain in Woodland Hills, the companies said in a release.

Local Score for IPC

For more than a decade North Hollywood-based IPC-The Hospitalist Company has been managing hospitalist practices around the country, growing to more than 200 facilities in 15 states. But none of the contracts were in its backyard, until now.

The company announced last week that it had been awarded a contract with Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center, a 265-bed, HCA Inc.-owned facility in Thousand Oaks. It is IPC’s first contract in Southern California and the first arrangement of this type for Los Robles, which is undergoing a $120 million expansion. Hospitalists are physicians who practice exclusively in hospitals and don’t maintain their own outpatient practice.

Privately held IPC had annual revenue in 2006 that grew 36 percent to $150 million. The company has venture backing from Sightline Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, and is in line to go public within the next few years.

New Promise at Hospital

Unlike the usual hospital stay these days, there are no more four day in-and-outs at Promise Hospital’s Suburban Medical Center campus in Paramount, now the largest free-standing long-term acute care hospital in Southern California.

The 36-year-old former Tenet Healthcare facility had been an acute care hospital and emergency room a layout not necessarily suited for caring for primarily elderly Medicare patients who often need several weeks to recover from a severe head injury or to be weaned off a ventilator after a heart attack or respiratory failure.

The 177-bed facility managed by Boca Raton, Fla.-based Promise Healthcare Inc. last week unveiled an extensive renovation that included converting the emergency room into an outpatient wound care and hyperbaric center and installing a Healing Garden where more mobile patients and their visitors can relax.

“This is a whole new sector of long-term care that is more intensive than skilled nursing but is better suited for longer stays than a traditional acute hospital,” said Promise Healthcare Executive Vice President Richard Gold, who didn’t provide a cost for the extensive hospital facelift, which include several new pieces of state-of-the-art medical equipment.

While Promise, one of the nation’s largest operators of long-term acute care hospitals, manages the hospital and lends its branding, a separate entity owns the hospital. Promise Hospital East Los Angeles LP, a group of Florida investors that earlier bought and converted East Los Angeles’ Lincoln Hospital Medical Center into a similar format, acquired Suburban Medical from Tenet Healthcare Corp. in 2004.

Surgeon-CEO Honored

Taking a break from running his $4 billion Los Angeles drug development company last week, Patrick Soon-Shiong stopped by his former employer UCLA to chat with officials from China’s Sun Yat-Sen University. The school is seeking closer relationships with its U.S. counterparts, especially in the area of medical research and education.

The meeting was among several efforts to promote global ties that the 54-year-old Soon-Shiong, founder and chief executive of Abraxis BioScience Inc., has been involved with over the years. It’s also among several reasons that the South African native of Chinese descent was among 100 recipients this month of the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

The National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations presents the award annually to Americans who have maintained strong ties to their ancestry and furthered the growth of ethnic America. Dr. Soon-Shiong was honored for his efforts in scientific innovation. While a researcher at UCLA in the 1980s, he helped pioneer procedures to transplant pancreatic cells to treat diabetes. His pair of drug development and manufacturing companies, which merged last year under the Abraxis name, employ a Trojan Horse-style nanotechnology he helped develop to improve drug delivery. The technology is used in Abraxis’ new breast cancer drug Abraxane, which had sales of $174.9 million last year.

Strategic Alliance

Diamond Bar-based diagnostic catheter developer Biosense Webster Inc. has formed a strategic partnership with medical device giant Medtronic Inc. to collaborate on a clinical trial, educational initiatives and a product development program aimed at advancing the care of patients with irregular heartbeats, also known as cardiac arrhythmias.

Staff reporter Deborah Crowe can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 232, or at

[email protected]

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