Cochlear Ltd to be taken over?

There is a report on New York Times that Medtronic, a company manufacturing medical devices, is launching a possible take over bid for Cochlear Ltd.

Article linked. For those lazy to click, the full article is archived below:

Cochlear CEO: Takeover Bid Possible

MELBOURNE, Australia, Mar 29, 2007 (AP Online via COMTEX) — The chief of Australian hearing implant company Cochlear Ltd. said Thursday he had “no idea” if U.S.-based Medtronic Inc. is interested in taking it over, but that such a bid was possible.

Broking house ABN Amro said in a research note Cochlear could be an “attractive takeover candidate” for Medtronic, which is currently seeking acquisitions.

“I guess as a public company it’s always a possibility, but I don’t think there’s any magic in this” scenario, Cochlear CEO Chris Roberts told Dow Jones Newswires.

He said he had “no idea” if Medtronic could be interested and hasn’t been approached. Roberts also questioned why ABN AMRO’s target price on Cochlear was still below the company’s share price if it considered Cochlear a potential target.

A spokeswoman in Australia for Medtronic, which is based in Fridley, Minnesota, said the company doesn’t comment on mergers and acquisitions.

Cochlear’s share price has more than tripled in the past three years. The company, which competes mainly with U.S.-based Advanced Bionics, a unit of Boston Scientific Corp., holds around 70 percent of the global market for hearing implants.

Cochlear shares traded at around 63 Australian dollars on Thursday, valuing the company at A$3.46 billion ($2.8 billion). ABN AMRO has a A$57.25 target price on the stock, raising it this week from A$54.50 to take into account the possibility it may be a target.

Medtronic, which has market capitalization of around $56.2 billion, makes a wide range of medical devices in the cardiac, neurological and orthopedics businesses, but doesn’t have a presence in the hearing implant market.

ABN AMRO analyst David Stanton said the workings of the cochlear implant are similar to Medtronic’s spinal stimulator and it could benefit from Cochlear’s expertise in research and development and manufacturing.

Copyright (C) 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Nucleus Hybrid Acoustic + Electrical Speech Processor

Thinking of doing a cochlear implant, but worried about the side effects of losing your residual hearing?

Here is a new Nucleus processor that tries to combine the benefits of both acoustic and electrical speech processing. Developed by both the University of Iowa and Cochlear for people with good low frequency hearing but very poor high frequency hearing, this cochlear implant is different from the traditional ‘electric-only’ cochlear implant in the sense that it tries to preserve some form of low frequency acoustic hearing in the ear. It tries to do this by having a reduced diameter and length (10 mm) to limit damage to the ear

The first recipient of this new implant was Arthur Gardner who wore a hearing aid together with this CI on the same ear!

Research results on the benefits of this new implant has been promising; they report improvement in speech perception and music recognition in this group of implant users as compared to traditional long-electrode cochlear implantees. There are even reports that the pure tone recognition scores of these implant users are close to that of the control group of normal hearing people. Here are a few excerpts:

Standard CI recipients report difficulty recognizing music and familiar melodies.This group of short electrode implant users is substantially more accurate than recipients of standard CIs in melody recognition, pure tone frequency discrimination, and timbre ratings for the low frequencies.

A + E processing improved speech perception in noise by a 9 dB S/N ratio (compared with long electrode subjects).

Going out to get one already? Not yet, clinicial trials on it are still underway and it has yet to receive official sanction. But judging from results, it promises to be the next big thing in cochlear implants.

More news on it: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/health/301568_auditory29.html

Welcome!

As you can see from the blog title, this will be a blog on all things (but not limited to) related to Cochlear Implants. I hope to crawl the web looking for interesting experiences, scientific updates (which means reading research papers!), exciting technological breakthroughs in cochlear regeneration, and more, to post on this blog to share with you all!

If you would like research papers on any specific topic, please contact me and I’ll see if I have them!