By Paul Sandle
LONDON (Reuters) - British pharmaceutical company BTG announced two deals on Thursday that it said could create an interventional medicine business with potential sales of $1 billion.
Chief Executive Louise Makin told Reuters the deals would more than double BTG's revenues in the fast-growing market of targeting specific areas rather than administering drugs to the whole body.
BTG added to its liver cancer treatments by agreeing to buy the targeted therapies division of Nordion Inc for about $200 million, adding Therasphere radioactive glass beads to its chemotherapy beads unit.
It is also buying EKOS Corp for an initial $180 million, plus up to $40 million in future payments, to gain a treatment for severe blood clots, which can be fatal if they cause a pulmonary embolism.
Some of the cost of buying the Nordion unit will come from the placing of 32.8 million new shares, representing just under 10 percent of BTG's share capital, BTG said.
"Together we can see we are going to have the potential to build a $1 billion business," Makin said in an interview on Thursday. "We are going to have the important products for the vascular surgeons, the interventional radiologists and the interventional cardiologists."
Shares in the group were trading 0.2 percent lower at 338 pence by 11:49 GMT, outperforming a 2.2 percent weaker mid-cap index.
Analysts Savvas Neophytou at Panmure Gordon and Peel Hunt's Paul Cuddon both upgraded BTG to "buy" from "hold" on the back of the deals.
Cuddon said he did not expect the acquisitions to boost earnings in the next two years but in the longer term they could make BTG "a more compelling M&A target with critical mass in interventional medicine."
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BTG says interventional medicine buys could boost sales to $1 bln