St. Jude to buy AGA Medical

St. Jude Medical Inc. will acquire AGA Medical Holdings Inc. for $1.1 billion in a cash-and-stock deal that it hopes will boost its portfolio of products that fix heart defects.

The purchase should help Little Canada-based St. Jude diversify away from its bread-and-butter offerings of pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators, a mature market with limited growth.

Plymouth-based AGA makes a variety of patches and plugs to fix holes and other structural defects in the heart in minimally invasive ways. That market, while currently small, has tremendous potential.