According to specialized news website Bloomberg, Abbott Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are in the running to acquire Bausch + Lomb, which Warburg Pincus LLC is seeking to sell. Merck & Co and Pfizer have also shown interest in the company, according to Bloomberg, which has quoted anonymous sources.

 

Warburg expects to receive the first-round bids by the end of January, and is said to be seeking at least $10 billion. Such a transaction would be the third biggest sale ever by a private-equity-controlled company. The company had paid about $4.6 billion in 2007 for Bausch + Lomb, an acquisition that included debt. Since then, its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization have risen from $400 million to just under $700 million. Its 2013 projected earnings are about $800 million.

 

Bausch + Lomb’s businesses are pharmaceuticals, vision care and surgical. About 40% of its sales come from North America, 33% from Europe and the rest from Asia and Latin America. Its Canadian head office is located in Vaughan, Ontario.

Source:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-03/abbott-j-j-sanofi-said-to-show-interest-in-bausch-lomb-bid.html

 

 

 

In the United States, the National Academy of Engineering presented the prestigious Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ prize to three scientists whose work has led to the development of PRK and LASIK eye surgery.

 

Rangaswamy Srinivasan, James J. Wynne and Samuel E. Blum will receive their awards at a gala dinner event in Washington, D.C., in February. The highest honour in the field of bioengineering, this award comes with a $500,000 grant.

 

At the end of 2011, nearly 25 million people had undergone pulsed ultraviolet laser surgery to improve their eyesight, a procedure made possible by the discovery of ablative photodecomposition.

 

In the early part of the 1980s, Srinivasan, Wynne and Blum discovered that such a laser could irradiate animal tissue with great precision without causing damage to the surrounding tissue. Srinivasan and Wynne then tested the procedure on human tissue. Finally, in 1983, Rangaswamy Srinivasan, along with co-workers Bodil Braren and Stephen Trokel, published a paper in American Journal of Ophthalmology on the potential benefits of this laser for corrective eye surgery.

 

Source:

http://eyewiretoday.com/view.asp?r=retinatoday&a=20130103-national_academy_of_engineering_to_honor_creators_of_laser_refractive_eye_surgery