A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Roche Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) said it has signed a new seven-year contract with HCA (Nashville, Tennessee) to provide bedside blood glucose testing systems to all 180 HCA acute-care hospitals in the U.S.

Roche said the overall value of the agreement is expected to be in excess of $50 million.

Included in the contract are the Accu-Chek Inform hospital blood glucose meters, the Accu-Chek Comfort Curve hospital test strips, the Accu-Chek Safe-T-Pro lancet device, and ancillary IT products.

“This agreement is representative of a strong, long-standing relationship with HCA and HealthTrust Purchas-ing Group, and brings our full portfolio of hospital blood glucose products to their customers,” said Rod Cotton, senior vice president, U.S. Point of Care Diagnostics at Roche Diagnostics.

HCA is comprised of locally managed facilities that include about 190 hospitals and 91 outpatient surgery centers in 23 states, England and Switzerland.

In other grants/contracts news:

• Hologic (Bedford, Massachusetts) and Esaote (Genoa, Italy) said that they have entered into an exclusive distribution and service agreement in the U.S. for extremity MRI imaging systems manufactured by Esaote. The agreement is for an initial term of three years, with automatic one-year renewal options.

Hologic will sell and service Esaote’s line of extremity MRI systems for orthopedic and rheumatology imaging. Esaote’s systems provide a compact alternative to full-body MRI systems that require substantially higher capital costs and extensive build-outs, the companies said.

Extremity MRI systems are designed to provide a more comfortable patient experience as compared to full-body systems.

Esaote said it pioneered dedicated MRI imaging systems and is the world leader in this product category with more than 1,000 installations.

• Illumina (San Diego) reported that it has signed a multi-year, genotyping services agreement with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK; London). Illumina will use Sentrix arrays in conjunction with the company’s GoldenGate and Infinium assays to conduct genetic studies for thousands of samples provided by GSK.

The blanket agreement enables multiple projects to be conducted over a period of time.

Illumina, which describes itself as a developer of next-generation tools for the large-scale analysis of genetic variation and function, has worked with GSK since June 2001, genotyping samples for a number of pharmacogenomics studies.