ALFRED MANN AT IT AGAIN; LATEST INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING BID INVOLVES MINIMED SPINOFF ADVANCED BIONICS.

Byline: Ben Sullivan Daily News Staff Writer

IPO watchers take note: Alfred Mann, godfather of Los Angeles biomedicine, is about to take another company public.

At a biotechnology conference this week in San Francisco, officials with Mann's Sylmar-based Advanced Bionics discussed the company with analysts and investors. The company now expects to have an initial public offering later this year, a spokesman told the Daily News.

Interest in the IPO is expected to be strong. Unlike recent IPOs for Internet-based companies, Advanced Bionics has strong sales and sells an actual product, not just a Web site.

Advanced Bionics, which was spun off from Mann's highly successful MiniMed Inc. in 1993, is the nation's only maker of cochlear implants. The $10,000 devices, also known as bionic ears, let a high percentage of profoundly deaf children and adults hear by electrically stimulating nerve cells in the inner ear.

Both the implant and procedure, which costs another $30,000 or so, are covered by Medicare and by most private health insurance.

In addition to the hearing business, which the company said is growing at 40 percent annually with anticipated 1999 sales of $36 million, officials with Advanced Bionics said it is the company best poised to profit from the growing field of neurostimulation. Using the same technology platform created for the ear implant, they expect to market in coming years products for treating chronic pain, incontinence and ultimately ailments as severe as blindness and paralysis.

``We plan to have a public offering to raise capital and funds to further the extensive research we're doing in these other areas,'' said company spokesman Doug Lynch. Lynch, who is himself deaf, was an early recipient of an Advanced Bionics ear implant.

Given Mann's financial success at MiniMed, analysts say an Advanced Bionics IPO would likely find eager investors. MiniMed dominates the market for insulin infusion pumps, which diabetics - including the current Miss America - wear to deliver the sugar-regulating hormone to their bodies on an as-needed basis.

MiniMed's sales have more than doubled in three years, from $45 million in fiscal 1995 to $99.5 million last year. The company's share price has likewise climbed, from about $35 a share a year ago to a Thursday close of $94.0625.

``Based on Al Mann's track record and ability to make money for himself and shareholders, the American investing public is going to be interested in anything he's involved with,'' said analyst Phillip Nalbone at Volpe Brown Whelan in San Francisco.

The company said it is still too early to say how much money will be raised or when precisely an IPO would occur. And as with nearly all IPOs, individual investors hoping to get in on the ground floor may find themselves locked out.

Typically, the only individuals who can buy into an IPO before it is available to the general public are the best customers of the brokerages that are handling the IPO and employees of the company going public.

If the recent Internet IPOs are any guide, shares of an IPO can double or triple between the time a company offers them to the brokerages and when those shares actually begin trading on Wall Street.

Lynch said he did not know even at this point which firm will underwrite the deal.

While Advanced Bionics faces some competition in the cochlear implant market from an Australian company, Cochlear Ltd., it is in the midst of an ambitious expansion campaign that has seen it open offices in Europe, South America, Canada and the Middle East in the past two years. And by most technical standards, its implant is more advanced than anything else on the market.

``Mann has said we will make the deaf hear, the blind see and the lame walk,'' Lynch said. ``Coming from almost any other person, that might seem too lofty a goal, but he's a man who will make that happen.''

In February 1998, Mann donated $100 million each to the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California so they could create bioengineering research centers.

Three decades ago, Mann founded Pacesetters Inc., one of the most successful heart pacemaker manufacturers, which he later sold to a Minnesota-based medical devices manufacturer.