A Medical Device Daily

The Mann Foundation for Biomedical Engineering (West Lafayette, Indiana) reported a $100 million gift that it will make to endow an Alfred Mann Institute at Purdue University.

The university-based institute is designed to enable the commercialization of biomedical technologies designed to improve human health.

The $100 million endowment is the largest single endowment ever created for Purdue, the foundation said.

Alfred Mann, described as a "serial medical device entrepreneur," according to the foundation, said his goal is to build a bridge between academia and industry to move health-related products to doctors and their patients in an accelerated process.

Jischke, president of Purdue, said the gift will allow the university to pursue a "new model of university technology transfer."

The institute will help identify about two new biomedical projects per year out of the hundreds at Purdue with commercialization potential, growing to as many as six ongoing projects when in full operation.

In other grants/contracts news:

• Guardian Technologies (Herndon, Virginia), a developer of imaging informatics solutions for homeland security and healthcare, has submitted a proposal to the U.S. government for funding of a $5 million R&D grant to expand the current capabilities of Signature Mapping for the early detection of breast cancer.

Guardian has teamed with Howard University (Washington) and the Medical Imaging Informatics Labs at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles) to pursue federal grant funding under the funded Center of Excellence program. The research and development proposal is titled, "Enhanced Training for Diverse Populations Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Signature Mapping and Expanded Mammography Database." The team submitted its proposal under Broad Agency Announcement funding of the Department of Defense.

Building on the initial work conducted by Howard University and Georgetown University (Washington), the project would expand the clinical database from 260 patients to 500 patients, making it the largest longitudinal clinical database for breast cancer in the world, the company said. In addition, the proposed project would include the implementation of a DICOM-based, fault-tolerant data grid for image archiving and distribution; the development of a web-based front end complete with navigational and search tools capable of fully accessing the clinical database from anywhere in the world; and the development of interactive multimedia education modules for outreach teaching and training.

• Acacia Research (Newport Beach, California) reported that its CombiMatrix group has been awarded a new contract worth $869,000 by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to advance its Influenza Genotyping System.

The field-deployable system is based upon the company's CustomArray microarray platform and ElectraSense detection technologies. The system can provide the user with a compact and rugged analyzer that can identify H5N1 bird flu as well as all human strains of influenza A and various other upper-respiratory pathogens of interest, the company said.