A Medical Device Daily

The Institute for Health Technology Studies (InHealth; Washington) has launched a new capital campaign to raise up to $10 million in funding to advance its mission of sponsoring evidence-based research on the value and impact of medical devices and diagnostics.

The campaign, which will extend through 2009, was reported at the recent 2008 Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed; Washington) annual meeting in La Quinta, California.

The campaign's "quiet phase" has already secured $4.2 million in pledges. Donors include original funders Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, New Jersey); Stryker (Kalamazoo, Michigan); St. Jude Medical (St. Paul, Minnesota); the C. R. Bard Foundation (Murray Hill, New Jersey); BD (Franklin Lanes, New Jersey) and the Edwards Lifesciences Fund (Irvine, California).

InHealth was founded with unrestricted donations from leaders of the medical technology industry, whose vision was to establish an independent, non-profit organization to fund objective, peer-review quality research and analysis on the impact and value of medical technology.

In this latest campaign, donors may channel their pledges to areas of interest that correspond to industry sectors, such as cardiovascular, orthopedic, wound care, diagnostic imaging, in vitro and molecular diagnostics.

In 2008, InHealth will award at least five new research grants totaling up to $1.5 million and organize new educational forums. This spring, InHealth will launch the next generation of its web site, designed to bring together an interactive community of those with an interest in medical technology innovation and provide real-time news, research and information on its impact.

In contract news:

• Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh reported it is part of a collaboration that recently has been awarded a $2.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop an external heart pump designed specifically for small children.

There are VADs approved by the FDA for use in adults and larger adolescents in the U.S, but none are designed and approved for use in infants and toddlers.

Cardiac experts in Children's Hospital's Heart Center are involved in two separate projects to develop external and implantable VADs. It is estimated that as many as 1,000 children annually may benefit from these technologies, according to Peter Wearden, MD, PhD, a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon and director of pediatric mechanical cardiopulmonary support at Children's.

"Unfortunately, because this is a relatively small market, companies that make medical devices historically have not focused their attention on pediatric VADs," Wearden said. "Because of this, our options for treating young children in heart failure have been extremely limited. Our hope is that these two projects will lead to the first pediatric devices being approved by the FDA."

• SurgiCount Medical (Temecula, California), a division of Patient Safety Technologies (Temecula, California), the manufacturer of the Safety-Sponge surgical sponge counting system, reported that Jackson Health System (Miami), an integrated healthcare delivery system, has entered into a contract to use SurgiCount Medical's computer-assisted sponge counting system.

SurgiCount's Safety-Sponge System consists of individually bar-coded surgical sponges and an easy-to-use portable scanner that enhances traditional hand sponge counts and will be implemented in all 46 operating rooms in the Jackson Health System network.