Alltracel buys oral care company
position in the dissolvable film market with a reverse takeover of
London firm Westone Products.
Alltracel has conditionally agreed to buy the share capital of the privately-owned product development company that supplies oral care products to branded and private label sectors in Europe, the US and Asia for €8 million.
The deal will help the Irish company develop its proprietary m.doc technology for use in different applications, such as wound care, oral care and cholesterol management.
The technology has already been used in commercially available woundcare products, as it has been found form a film over cuts, stopping bleeding rapidly. But the cellulose particles have also been shown to lower LDL cholesterol levels in animal studies.
The new deal gives Alltracel rights to a number of oral care patents as well as a portfolio of dissolvable thin film products that can be used as carriers for flavours and other active ingredients. The range is produced by a majority-owned venture with Devro, called Biofilm.
Biofilm's original test facility, located in Devro's Moodiesburn plant, has recently been upgraded to a full pilot production unit, capable of supplying commercial volumes of products as the business develops.
Using edible film strips to deliver nutrients and active ingredients is gaining interest from the pharmaceutical and nutritional products industry and they are set to be the source of a number of new launches in 2005.
Alltracel also gains access to manufacturing and packaging facilities in Shenzhen, China, via a joint venture held between Devro and Westone, which generated €11.5 million for the year to 30 September.
Alltracel CEO Tony Richardson said: "We believe that the combination of Alltracel and Westone will give a solid platform for expanding the m.doc brand, and an enhanced capability to bring new products to market."
A recent report from Datamonitor's Productscan service said that the three-year-old, melt-in-your-mouth wafer-thin strip has gained momentum among consumers since the 2001 launch of Pfizer's Listerine PocketPaks. Dissolving breath freshening strips hit $200 million in US sales just one year later, and a total of 128 different strip products hit packaged goods markets around the world in just the first nine months of 2004, more than a five-fold increase from 2002.
And this trend is not confined to the US. Productscan has logged breath strip introductions in the Netherlands, Japan, South Africa, the Philippines, Colombia and the UK this year, just to name a few countries, and predicts that the format will be adopted increasingly in the over-the-counter pharmaceutical space.
"One of the few limitations of dissolving film strips right now is the size of most strip products," said ProductScan editor Tom Viehile. "The small size means that only a limited quantity of active ingredients will fit onto a strip. Larger size strips could be one solution to this size constraint."
