A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

CompuMed (Los Angeles) reported that it has been awarded a contract by the California Department of Corrections (CDC) to provide ECG services and cardiology over-reads for correctional facilities statewide.

CompuMed will provide its CardioGram ECG machines and over-read services, which will link CDC facilities with CompuMed’s network of cardiologists.

“The quality of care provided by correctional facilities is a burning issue for healthcare providers,” said CompuMed CEO Maurizio Vecchione. “CompuMed is in a position to help correctional facilities provide the highest standard of care when it comes to cardiology services, while at the same time reducing their liability significantly. The CDC contract provides us with a platform for expanding our installed base in California and follows an upgrade of our service platform that included an expansion of our cardiology provider network and improved quality of service.”

The company said the CardioGram system reduces healthcare costs significantly by providing remote cardiac screening at the point of care. Key advantages include a feature that automatically sends ECG results to a trained cardiologist for an over-read when the results are abnormal, as well as the ability to store data for Electronic Medical Records purposes.

CompuMed develops products that combine advanced imaging with medical informatics with a focus on the analysis and remote monitoring for patients with cardiovascular and musculoskeletal diseases.

OSI Systems (Hawthorne, California) a provider of specialized electronic products for critical applications in the security and healthcare industries, reported that its Security division, Rapiscan Systems (Sunnyvale, California) has been awarded a $9.3 million contract from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for its 620DV Advanced Technology X-ray systems.

The contract, representing half of the total systems currently ordered by TSA, follows successful piloting of Advanced Technology (AT) Passenger Carry-On Bag Screening Systems at select airport locations. Under the terms of the agreement, the company expects to begin delivering the systems to the TSA in the second quarter of the company’s fiscal year.

Rapiscan Systems President, Ajay Mehra, said, “We are pleased to be working closely with the TSA in this critical program. This program represents the deployment of one of the most advanced technologies available today for passenger checkpoint screening. The Rapiscan 620DV system is designed specifically to detect aviation-based threats while improving checkpoint operations.”

Rapiscan is a supplier of security inspection solutions utilizing X-ray and gamma-ray imaging, and advanced threat identification techniques such as neutron and diffraction analysis.

In grant news:

• SeraCare Life Sciences (West Bridgewater, Massachusetts) said it has been awarded a seven-year contract valued at $23.7 million to provide management and oversight of disease-study specimens for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Division of AIDS (DAIDS). NIAD is a component of the National Institutes of Health.

SeraCare will provide cataloging, processing, labeling, storage and dispersal of specimens for DAIDS. The company will also provide technical support and training to NIH collaborators and investigators on issues related to specimen processing and handling.

SeraCare provides products and services to facilitate the discovery, validation and production of human diagnostics and therapeutics.

• Affymetrix (Santa Clara, California) said it has been awarded a $10.2 million scale-up grant over the next four years from the National Human Research Institute (NHGRI), as part of the expanded ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. The grant is part of a project involving 16 multinational research centers that totals more than $80 million, the company noted. The goals of the ENCODE project are to identify the various functional regions found across the human genome and to develop new high-throughput technologies associated with this task.

The project at Affymetrix will be led by Thomas Gingeras, PhD, VP for biological science, and will focus on mapping and characterizing all of the human genome regions that are transcribed into RNA, an information molecule vital to a number of biological functions, including protein production. The project title is “Comprehensive Characterization and Classification of the Human Transcriptome.”

According to Affymetrix, the project brings together six other international laboratories, including: University of Geneva (Switzerland), Center for Genomic Regulation (Barcelona, Spain), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (New York), RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center (Yokohama, Japan), University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and the Genome Institute of Singapore. The group will identify protein-coding and non-protein-coding ribonucleic acid (RNA) transcripts using microarrays, high-throughput sequencing, sequenced paired-end ditags and sequenced cap analysis of gene expression tags.

Affymetrix says pharmaceutical, diagnostic and biotechnology companies, as well as academic, government and not-for-profit research institutes, use its technology.