Mesa Laboratories has purchased the dental sterilizer testing business of North Bay Bioscience (NBSS), for around of $11.2m.
NBBS business is said to be involved in testing of small table-top sterilizers in the US dental industry under CDC and State guidelines, which generally require that each sterilizer is tested weekly using biological indicators (BI’s).
Mesa Laboratories CEO and president John Sullivan said: "Mesa has long been a major supplier of BI’s to the dental testing market, but we have never provided a service directly to dentists, such as that conducted by NBBS.
"With this acquisition, we are now more directly involved with the users of our products, which allows us to capture additional margin for these products."
In practice, NBBS provides a kit that contains sufficient BI’s for 52 weeks of testing, for each sterilizer of the dental practice.
These are processed through the sterilizer in the dental office to conduct the test and will be mailed back to NBBS for testing to determine if the sterilizer was working correctly.
The service helps to track the performance of each sterilizer and enables the dental practice to monitor this data on-line.
NBBS also supplies self-contained biological indicators to the dental market in both the US and Canada, allowing dentists to perform the testing process in-house.