A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Siemens Medical Solutions (Malvern, Pennsylvania), a developer of medical equipment and information technology (IT) solutions, and EMC (Hopkinton, Massachusetts), a provider of information management and storage, have signed a reseller agreement enabling Siemens to offer EMC information lifecycle management (ILM) products and solutions to the healthcare market.

To help healthcare providers store, manage and protect a growing amount of increasingly complex patient information and clinical images, Siemens will offer EMC Symmetrix, EMC CLARiiON and EMC Centera networked storage systems and platform software with its medical imaging solutions, Soarian health information solutions, and syngo suite of radiology information system and picture archiving and communication systems offerings.

While innovations in diagnostic technologies continue to multiply the volumes of digital image data, healthcare providers are looking for solutions to optimize their information infrastructure to help enhance clinical productivity, meet tighter compliance mandates and reduce administrative costs.

Siemens’ expertise in healthcare IT and imaging modalities and EMC’s information management and storage solutions will help customers more efficiently manage their valuable information assets, support regulatory compliance and achieve greater economies of scale to accelerate clinical care decision-making, the companies said.

Applied Biosystems Group (Foster City, California) and Qiagen (Venlo, the Netherlands) have entered into a license agreement. Applied Biosystems has granted a license to Qiagen under the expanded Applied Biosystems PCR (polymerase chain reaction) licensing program.

The expanded program includes patents for real-time PCR and other important PCR-related technologies not licensed under the previous PCR licensing program. Financial terms of the license were not disclosed.

The Applied Biosystems expanded PCR licensing program includes licenses to the foundational patents as well as the two leading real-time PCR techniques known as the TaqMan assay and the Dye-Intercalation Assay method. It also includes patents covering an improved form of the Taq polymerase enzyme (AmpliTaq Gold technology) used to initiate PCR and referred to as Hot-Start.

Although the foundational patents covering the PCR process expired in the U.S. in March and will expire elsewhere in March of next year, numerous other patents related to PCR remain in force. These surviving patents cover, for example, enzyme compositions, kits, and methods such as reverse transcription and DNA sequencing. Applied Biosystems will continue to offer licenses to these patents.

Stratagene (La Jolla, California), a maker of specialized life science research and diagnostic products, reported it has entered into a license, manufacturing and supply agreement with privately-held Focus Diagnostics (Herndon, Virginia) to address the growing molecular diagnostics market for infectious diseases.

Focus is a specialty diagnostics company that develops infectious disease products and is a leading reference laboratory for infectious and immunological diseases.

Under the agreement, Stratagene has granted Focus a non-exclusive license to its FullVelocity technology, and will provide expertise and knowledge that Focus will use to develop selected molecular diagnostics testing kits and products.

Stratagene also will manufacture the diagnostic products that Focus intends to commercialize globally. And Stratagene will manufacture and sell reagents to Focus for laboratory-developed tests to be used in Focus’ national reference laboratory.

In other agreements:

• Aspect Medical Systems (Newton, Massachusetts) and the Brain Resource Co. (BRC; Sydney, Australia) have agreed to collaborate in a multi-year clinical study that will evaluate brain electrical activity in patients identified with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a memory impairment that often precedes Alzheimer’s disease.

The study will be conducted with researchers from Brown University’s Butler Hospital (Providence, Rhode Island) and Westmead Hospital (Sydney).

• Emageon (Birmingham, Alabama), a provider of enterprise visual medical systems to hospitals and healthcare networks, reported that it has entered into a digital healthcare information management agreement with Meridian Health, an integrated delivery system serving central New Jersey.

Together with Emageon, Meridian will be implementing a system-wide digital image management and visualization system.

• Optio Software (Alpharetta, Georgia) reported that it is partnering with HomeTown Health, an organization of 48 Georgia rural hospitals, to deliver electronic health record (EHR) and forms automation software solutions to Georgia’s community hospitals.

Optio will provide its QuickRecord Suite of EHR software solutions and its MedEx forms automation applications to HomeTown Health member hospitals based on what it termed “a low-cost, application service provider-based model.”

• Lifestream Technologies (Post Falls, Idaho), a supplier of cholesterol monitors, said that it has entered an agreement with GenExel-Sein (Seoul, South Korea) for the production of the new Lifestream Three-In-One Blood Pressure monitor.

The Three-in-One Blood Pressure monitor will measure blood pressure, cholesterol and HDL, all in less than three minutes. Consumer awareness for cholesterol testing can be significantly expanded through this merger. Between 5 million and 7 million blood pressure monitors are sold each year in the U. S., or 14 million worldwide.

GenExel ibusiness units provide products for home medical diagnosis and engage in the discovery and development of pharmaceutical products with an emphasis on central system disorders (such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease).

• Response Biomedical (Vancouver, British Columbia) said it has appointed LXU Healthcare (West Boylston, Massachusetts), formerly known as Primesource Healthcare, a provider of medical equipment and specialty devices, as the exclusive distributor for its RAMP Cardiovascular Tests in a number of key markets in the U.S.

Response Biomedical has received FDA and Canadian regulatory clearance for its fluorescence-based RAMP Reader for general clinical use and three RAMP Cardiac Marker Tests for detecting troponin I, CK-MB and myoglobin.

LXU Medical, LXU Healthcare’s Medical-Surgical division, also will distribute the company’s NT-proBNP test, which is expected to be available towards the end of 2006.

The quantitative tests are designed to assist in the rapid diagnosis of a broad array of cardiovascular conditions including congestive heart failure, heart attack or acute myocardial infarction, and risk stratification of patients with acute coronary syndrome or heart failure.