Boston Scientific said lawsuit is dismissed

Boston Scientific Corp., the Natick company that makes medical devices such as stents (right), said today that a federal judge in Indiana dismissed a lawsuit brought by former shareholders of Guidant Corp., which Boston Scientific bought in 2006 for $27 billion.

The former shareholders alleged that the defendants, several of Guidant's former directors and officers, had breached their fiduciary duties in selling shares that they allegedly knew were artificially inflated; the former directors and officers sold stock ahead of a recall of Guidant products.

In making the deal to acquire Guidant, Boston Scientific beat out Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey healthcare giant, in a high-profile bidding war.

The combination of Boston Scientific and Guidant was part of a strategy that aimed to make Boston Scientific the world's biggest maker of heart devices; one key product category of Boston Scientific is stents - wire meshed tubes used to keep open arteries that have been unclogged during medical procedures.

At the time of the merger, Guidant was selling $1.6 billion worth of implantable defibrillators a year.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)