LID.L Regulatory News (LID)

LIDCO GROUP PLC

("LiDCO" or the "Company")

LiDCO signs UK distribution contract with Argon Medical

LiDCO Group Plc (AIM: LID), the cardiovascular monitoring company, today announces that its exclusive UK marketing collaboration with the critical care product platform of Becton, Dickinson U.K. Limited ("BD") will continue under the platform's new owner, Argon Medical Devices, Inc ("Argon Medical"). Argon Medical acquired the critical care business of BD in September 2010. The marketing collaboration, which has been in place since 2007, will be extended with Argon Medical and under the terms of the agreement, LiDCO will take full sales and marketing responsibility for the existing business of Argon Medical's critical care products in the UK and Ireland.

Argon Medical designs, manufactures and sells single-use specialty medical device disposables. LiDCO will sell Argon Medical's arterial blood pressure monitoring sensors, acute care catheters and extended dwell catheters. These products, which complement and strengthen LiDCO's offering, are well established in the UK and will be sold to LiDCO's current customer base in the intensive care and surgery markets.  Initial sales are anticipated by the summer.

Dr Terry O'Brien, CEO of LiDCO, commented: "We are delighted to sign this agreement with Argon Medical, which consolidates and extends our long standing relationship with the former BD critical care team. There is a natural fit between our technologies - a blood pressure sensor is required in all of our target patient population. We have already shown that use of our hemodynamic monitoring technology can reduce surgical complications and the cost of such care by an average of £4,800 per patient treated. This means that LiDCO's direct UK sales force can provide UK and Irish hospitals with both blood flow and now blood pressure monitoring solutions.

 "We will provide more details on this collaboration in our preliminary results announcement in April. "

George Leondis, President of Argon Medical Devices, Inc added: "We are pleased to reach an agreement with LiDCO and thus ensure that we continue to serve the needs of both UK and Irish clinicians and their patients."

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About Argon Medical Devices, Inc.

Argon Medical Devices, Inc., based in Athens, Texas, is a privately-held global medical device company which manufactures and markets solutions for cardiovascular, venous access and critical care procedures. It is a portfolio company of Roundtable Healthcare Partners.

Argon Medical offers a broad line of internationally accepted, single-use medical devices for Interventional Radiology, Interventional Cardiology, and Critical Care. Its products are sold through a combination of direct sales representatives and premier distributors in the United States and a network of leading distributors internationally.

About LiDCO Group Plc

LiDCO is a supplier of minimally invasive hemodynamic equipment to hospitals, to monitor the amount of blood flowing around the body and ensure that vital organs are adequately oxygenated. LiDCO's products facilitate the measurement, analysis, audit, training and sharing of real-time and historic hemodynamic data, in both critical care units and the operating theatre. 

Scientific evidence is increasingly linking the optimisation of patients' hemodynamic status with better outcomes and reduced hospital stays and LiDCO's computer-based technology, developed at St Thomas' Hospital in London, has been shown to significantly reduce morbidity and complications, length of stay and overall costs associated with major surgery.

Key Products:

All LiDCO monitors use single-patient disposables (sensors or smartcards) which provide an ongoing revenue stream.

Clinical Validation & Education

LiDCO has been selected as the sole technology for two ongoing multi-centre government-funded studies in the UK and US. OPTIMISE is sponsored by the UK Government for optimising cardiovascular management in high-risk abdominal surgery patients and in the US, MOnIToR is a US Government sponsored transplantation donor organ optimisation study. The Company has also developed a hemodynamic workshop at St George's Hospital, London.

LiDCO Distribution Network:

LiDCO products are sold through Covidien's sales force in the US. LiDCO's strategy is to sell directly to hospitals in the UK, and through a network of specialty critical care and anesthesia distributors in the rest of the world.

LiDCO's sales office is in Cambridge, its manufacturing facility and headquarters are in London and its shares are traded on AIM. For more information please see www.lidco.com.