Medical Device Industry Headlines
BD Diagnostics Launches The BD Protect(TM) Infection Surveillance And Prevention Software Portfolio
BD Diagnostics, a segment of BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), announced the launch of the BD Protect™ Infection Surveillance and Data Management System, a portfolio of healthcare management software solutions that tracks infections and helps prevent their transmission at three levels -- from patient to patient, between patients and healthcare workers, and from community sources to healthcare settings...
…Physicians Practice And All Children's Hospital To Improve Patient Care In St. Petersburg, FL
Physicians Practice and All Children's Hospital have joined forces to help provide area physicians and their staff more time to devote to patient care. This new partnership is a unique program designed to help doctors in the St. Petersburg area better handle the cumbersome and time-consuming issues of managing a busy practice. Through this new alliance, All Children's Hospital will use Physicians Practice's extensive resources to deliver essential practice management tools to help local physicians manage the business aspects of medicine more efficiently and effectively...
…Slo-Niacin(R), A Non-Prescription Dietary Supplement, Features Nicotinic Acid - The Most Effective Agent For Increasing HDL, 'Good Cholesterol'
Niacin, or nicotinic acid, when used under the care and monitoring of a healthcare provider, is the most effective agent available for increasing high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or "good cholesterol (1)." HDL is known as "good cholesterol" because it has protective effects on the heart and blood vessels. It not only removes excess cholesterol in the blood and brings it to the liver for disposal, it may also have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting effects (2). Some experts also believe that HDL removes excess cholesterol from arterial plaque, slowing its buildup (3)...
…Prometheus And Bayer Schering Pharma To Apply Novel Diagnostic Platform To Oncology Therapeutic Candidates
Prometheus Laboratories Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical and diagnostic company, announced the execution of a research collaboration and license agreement with Bayer Schering Pharma AG, Germany, a worldwide leading specialty pharmaceutical company. The collaboration partners Prometheus' proprietary oncology diagnostic platform with Bayer's broad oncology pipeline in an effort to stratify patients to appropriate drug candidates and potentially accelerate the development of novel oncology therapeutic products...
…Evidence-Based Protocols In Cancer Treatment Reduce Variation, Improve Efficacy And Safety Of Care
MedSolutions, a leading provider of medical cost management services, announced the launch of its oncology management program, which uses evidence-based guidelines to ensure appropriate use of diagnostic imaging, radiation therapy and drugs for cancer patients. "There is a vast and expanding body of research on cancer care, and doctors are understandably challenged to keep up with innovations in technology and best practices in treatment," said Gregg Allen, M.D., MedSolutions' chief medical officer. "This is further complicated by the number of new cancer cases in the U.S...
…Early Identification Of Alzheimer's Disease With PET Scan
Westside Medical Associates of Los Angeles and Westside Medical Imaging (WMI) of Beverly Hills announce the benefit of early positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to identify Alzheimer's in its early more treatable phase. According to Dr...
…Accelerating The Pace Of Discovery In Cancer Research
Moffitt Cancer Center and Proteacel LLC have announced that they have entered a licensing agreement under which Proteacel has acquired the exclusive rights to the PORE™ technology for delivery of genes into cells. Genes are the instructions that build cells. Defects in these genes cause disease, such as cancer. In order to understand how these genes work and their involvement in a disease process, researchers must study and modify them. The most common way to study gene function is to transfer the gene into cells...
…Duke Cell Therapy Center Benefit From Robertson Foundation Donation
A $10.2 million commitment from the Robertson Foundation to create a state-of-the-art Translational Cell Therapy Center (TCTC) will advance Duke Medicine's pioneering cell therapy research and treatment programs for children and adults with cancer, cerebral palsy, stroke and brain injuries suffered at birth. In making the announcement, Victor J...
…$1.2 Million Award from NIST Facilitates Groundbreaking Study Of Wireless Body Area Networks
WPI's Center for Wireless Information Network Studies (CWINS) has received a three-year, $1.2 million award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to conduct a groundbreaking study of the propagation of radio waves around and through the human body...
…Research!America Advocacy Award Honours March Of Dimes
March of Dimes was honored March 16, 2010, at the 14th Annual Research!America Advocacy Awards event at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC. Jennifer L. Howse, PhD, March of Dimes president, and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, granddaughter of March of Dimes founder President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, accepted the award. Established by President Roosevelt in 1938 to conquer polio, for more than 72 years March of Dimes has been a leader in improving the health of women and children...
…How Strong Is Your Booze? True Strength Of Alcohol Revealed By New Portable Device
Both legitimate brewers and distillers and authorities on the track of illicit alcohol from home stills will soon have a helping hand. Measurement experts have unveiled a portable device to determine the strength of alcoholic drinks quickly and easily, almost anywhere. Published in the open access Chemistry Central Journal, the researchers show that their technique is just as accurate, and more sophisticated, than widely used lab-based methods...
…Microbe Detective Seeks Out Germs
Microorganisms are everywhere and most of them are harmless, but they can do a lot of damage in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals or in tissue transplants. With the aid of a new device, germs can be detected in artificial cartilage within a few hours. We are surrounded by microorganisms. They inhabit our skin, the air we breathe, the surfaces we touch. In most cases this is not a problem, but there are situations in which these constant companions can be dangerous or even life-threatening...
…Hearing Is Not All Down To Your Ears
A fascinating event looking at sign language research is to be held at University College London on 20 March as part of the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) Festival of Social Science (21-21 March). The vast majority of research studies on language and thought are based on languages which are spoken and heard, so this event will provide an innovative and fresh approach. The DCAL open day will include lectures, hands on activities and sign language poetry and film performances. It has been organised by the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL)...
…Sleep Deprivation Influences Drug Use In Teens' Social Networks
More than one behavior can spread simultaneously across a social network. Recent studies have shown that behaviors such as happiness, obesity, smoking and altruism are "contagious" within adult social networks. In other words, your behavior not only influences your friends, but also their friends and so on. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Harvard University have taken this a step farther and found that the spread of one behavior in social networks in this case, poor sleep patterns influences the spread of another behavior, adolescent drug use...
…Treating Blood Infections Tops Annual Hospital Cost Increases
The hospital costs for treating septicemia increased by an average of nearly 12 percent each year from 1997 to 2007, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Treating this potentially deadly blood infection increased from $4.1 billion in 1997 to $12.3 billion in 2007. After adjusting for inflation, the federal agency also found other conditions that saw high annual increases in hospital costs in each of the 11 years between 1997 and 2007: -- Osteoarthritis, up 9.5 percent each year ($4.8 billion to $11...
…Prepared Patient: On Your Own With Multiple Meds
People with chronic illness often struggle to manage several prescribed drugs at a time. It's overwhelming when the vials, bottles and inhalers bulge from your medicine cabinet and you're confused about which drug is which, or when to take what. More medications seem to come with the territory as people get older. "Prescription drug use is heavily concentrated in people over 55 to 65," says Steven Findlay, senior health policy analyst at Consumers Union...
…Re-Accreditation Confirms High Quality, Ethical Research At Baylor Research Institute
Officials announced that Baylor Research Institute (BRI), part of the Baylor Health Care System, was recently re-accredited by the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP). The re-accreditation certifies that BRI maintains efficient systems for monitoring research participant safety and embraces ethical standards higher than required by law in order to protect human participants participating in BRI research programs. Only 200 out of the thousands of human research protection programs in the U.S...
…Timothy Hla Appointed To Lead Center For Vascular Biology At Weill Cornell Medical College
One of the nation's foremost vascular biologists, Dr. Timothy T. Hla, has been appointed as the new director of the Center for Vascular Biology and professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. Founded in 1995, Weill Cornell's Center for Vascular Biology is dedicated to biomedical research into vascular disease -- specifically atherosclerosis and thrombosis -- and the contributing role of the vascular system in a wide range of diseases. Previously leading the Center was its founding director, Dr. David P...
…Patients Recently Suffering Non-Severe Strokes May Be Eligible For Clinical Trial Of Minimally Invasive Stenting Procedure To Open Brain Arteries
Individuals between 30 and 80 years of age, who have had a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or non-severe stroke within the past 30 days, and who cannot be treated surgically, may be eligible to participate in a Phase III clinical trial of a minimally invasive stenting procedure at the Cedars-Sinai Neurovascular Center. The study will focus specifically on patients who have had an intracranial artery narrowed by at least 70 percent and who are experiencing recurrent strokes or TIAs despite being on anti-clotting medication...
…'Reform Your Own Health' During National Kidney Month
No matter what Washington does on health reform, there's a lot you can do to reform your own health -- and two of the best places to start are your kidneys. So says Dr. Ronald Weiss, chairman of Results for Life, an educational campaign of the American Clinical Laboratory Association. "March is more than just basketball and the start of spring. It is also National Kidney Month...
…