A Medical Device Daily

Medidata Solutions (New York) reported a multi-year contract extension with Bristol-Myers Squibb (New York) for use of Medidata Grants Manager, an investigator site benchmarking tool that helps sponsors ensure fair and consistent investigator payments, mitigate compliance risks and reduce trial start-up time. Under this new contract, Bristol-Myers Squibb will also be expanding its use of Grants Manager to include analysis and contracting modules.

Bristol-Myers Squibb has used Grants Manager for 15 years. Powered by the PICAS clinical cost database of negotiated agreements between sponsors and investigators, Grants Manager provides access to key fair market value data of investigator costs and payments. The Grants Manager solution enables clinical teams to facilitate clinical cost planning and budgeting processes and create consensus in the budget review and approval process.

QLT (Vancouver) has restructured its agreement with Novartis Pharma (Basel, Switzerland) to simplify the relationship, under which, effective Jan. 1, 2010, it will, among other things, receive exclusive U.S. rights to the Visudyne patents to sell and market Visudyne in the U.S. Visudyne, a photosensitizer co-developed with Novartis, is approved worldwide for the treatment of a form of wet age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of legal blindness in people over the age of 55 in North America and Europe.

Under the amended and restated PDT product development agreement, QLT will have exclusive U.S. sales and marketing rights to Visudyne, including rights to all end-user revenue derived from Visudyne sales in the U.S. Novartis will have marketing and sales rights in all countries outside of the U.S. and will pay QLT a royalty of 20% of ex-U.S. net sales until Dec. 31, 2014, and thereafter 16% of ex-U.S. net sales until the expiry of the amended PDT agreement on Dec. 31, 2019.

In other agreements/contracts news, continuing in its efforts to build momentum with U.S. Veterans Affairs hospitals, Picis (Wakefield, Massachusetts) reported that it has been awarded two Department of VA contracts by the Veterans Integrated Service Network 10, also known as the VA Healthcare System of Ohio. VISN 10 selected Picis Anesthesia Manager, PACU Manager and Critical Care Manager, part of the CareSuite family of high-acuity solutions, for its five VA medical centers to help clinicians better manage the clinical workflow and financial functions in anesthesia and post anesthesia care units (PACU)/recovery, as well as the intensive care unit and remote ICU.