In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, Medline’s blockbuster IPO, Fred Moll’s surgical robotics investments, Forbes’ inaugural top hospitals list, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
Charlie Mills, Medline’s former CEO and a key member of its founding family
AFP via Getty Images
Medical supplies giant Medline’s IPO is set to be this winter’s blockbuster–worth up to $55 billion. Documents for it also reveal for the first time the remaining stake of the Mills family, who founded the company in 1910 and ran it for generations. The family sold a majority stake to private equity in 2021 in a deal that valued the company at $30 billion.
A new securities filing shows that the Mills family’s stake is worth $6 billion to $7 billion, by Forbes estimates based on the disclosed shareholdings of Mozart HoldCo and an expected share price of $26-to-$30 per share, raising $5 billion total. Combined with estimated pretax proceeds of more than $22 billion from the earlier deal, that would give the Mills family–including Charlie Mills, the company’s former CEO; Andy Mills, his cousin and former president; and Jim Abrams, Andy’s brother-in-law and the former chief operating officer–a combined net worth of at least $20 billion by Forbes estimates.
Though Medline’s supplies, which include everything from baby blankets to bandages, are everywhere, the Mills family was largely unknown until Forbes profiled them in 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, its distribution of medical supplies to nursing homes, pharmacies and 45% of hospital systems nationwide was a critical part of the country’s coronavirus response.
Under private-equity ownership, and with a non-family CEO in Jim Boyle for the past two years, the company has been growing and profitable: Sales reached $25.5 billion in 2024, while profits rebounded to $1.2 billion.
This Robotic Surgery Legend Is Pouring $100 Million Into Next-Gen Medical Startups
Dr. Fred Moll
Courtesy of Fred Moll
Dr. Fred Moll left the practice of medicine more than four decades ago. But he’s responsible for some 3 million surgeries a year, done by robots that he helped invent as the cofounder of Intuitive Surgical, the leader in robotic surgeries with more than 10,000 machines deployed and $8.4 billion in 2024 revenue.
Now, three decades after its founding and nearly 25 years since he departed Intuitive to start more companies, Moll has plowed around $100 million of his own funds into the next generation of surgical robotics startups. Colonoscopies. Cataract surgeries. Heart-valve replacements. One day, he’s betting these and a slew of other medical procedures will be performed by robots, improved over time by AI that analyzes what’s worked and what hasn’t in similar situations in the past. The goal is to bring the best medical care to everyone, whether they’re in New York or Nagpur.
“I’ve spent my career watching other people do surgery. The difference between a good surgeon and an average surgeon is massive,” Moll, 73, told Forbes. “My ambition is that the robot can do procedures that people struggle with. Its impact is to raise the level of capability of average surgeons to very good surgeons in procedures that not everyone is good at.”
Read the whole story.
The Forbes Top Hospitals List
Introducing Forbes’ newest list: Forbes Top Hospitals 2026. This unbiased, data-driven rating system cuts through the confusion to identify general acute care hospitals across the country offering high-quality healthcare services. These inaugural ratings are meant to serve the best interests of patients while offering hospital leaders a unique vantage point with which to evaluate their facility’s performance in comparison with their peers.
To produce this list, Forbes partnered with Inovalon, a healthcare data and analytics firm, and collaborated with nationally recognized measurement experts, physicians, statisticians, health policy researchers and patient advocates.
Read more about the list here. To learn more about the methodology, click here. For answers to frequently asked questions about the ratings, click here.
Deal of the Week
Freenome, which is developing blood tests for early cancer detection, is going public in a SPAC deal. The Brisbane, California-based firm said that it would merge with Perceptive Capital Solutions Corp., in a $330 million deal that includes a $240 million investment from healthcare investors led by Perceptive Advisors and RA Capital. Freenome, which has deals with Roche and Exact Sciences, is one of a number of companies working on blood-based tests for cancer. Last month, in a sign of just how much promise is riding on them, Abbott announced that it would acquire Exact in a $21 billion deal. Freenome CEO Aaron Elliot has said that the company expects to launch multiple tests in 2026.
What We’re Reading
The CDC’s vaccine advisory panel voted last week to stop recommending hepatitis B vaccines to newborns–but health insurers plan to continue covering them.
While that hepatitis B vote may not have much impact now, the committee is laying the groundwork to undermine future vaccine development, argues Forbes contributor Joshua Cohen.
Humana and Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs are working on a partnership to lower prescription prices.
People who have health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will pay more–and get plans that have higher deductibles and cover less.
A rural North Carolina hospital that was slated to open in 2025 is still a dirt field with its future plans stuck in bureaucracy.
Indian billionaire Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw’s Biocon is buying out its privately-held subsidiary Biocon Biologics in a deal that values the biologics unit at $5.5 billion.
U.K. biotech Relation will work with Novartis to find allergic disease drug targets in a deal worth up to $1.7 billion.
Eli Lilly plans to be “aggressive” in spending the money it’s bringing in from GLP-1 drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro.
People vaccinated for COVID-19 had a 74% lower risk of death from severe disease than those who were unvaccinated, a 4-year follow-up study found.
Mark Cuban On Drug Costs
At last week’s Forbes Healthcare Summit, billionaire Mark Cuban and Humana CEO Jim Rechtin discussed the challenges of making drugs more affordable and how they would work together to do so. Watch the session below.
More From Forbes
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/innovationrx/2025/12/10/medlines-blockbuster-ipoand-its-billionaire-founding-family/
