A Medical Device Daily

PhysioNetics reported that it received a $750,000 Phase II grant from the National Institutes of Health to help it continue its development work on a new "gripper" for upper-extremity prostheses. The funds will be used to conduct clinical research with upper-extremity amputees to demonstrate that PhysioNetics' Vari-Pinch Prehensor (V2P) reduces cumulative injury and overuse syndrome among users. The grant monies also will be used to modify the V2P for commercial production.

The V2P's patented design enables users to easily adjust the gripper's pinch force to match the requirements of specific activities, thereby reducing muscle fatigue and lowering the risk of repetitive stress injuries.

In other grants news:

As part of the $5 billion in grants announced by President Obama, the National Institutes of Health has granted Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, California) more than $54 million over two years through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to conduct health research on a multitude of critical public and clinical health areas. The bulk of this research will utilize and leverage Kaiser Permanente's electronic health records, the world's largest civilian electronic health record database.

The NIH has awarded 22 grants to Kaiser Permanente researchers in various regional centers, including a $25 million Grand Opportunities (GO) grant to conduct genotyping on 100,000 Kaiser Permanente members participating in the Research Program on Genes, Environment and Health, the largest population-based bio-bank in the U.S.

This genetic information will be linked to data on participants from RPGEH health surveys, disease registries and Kaiser Permanente's vast electronic health record database, resulting in a resource that will allow researchers to examine genetic and environmental influences on a wide variety of health conditions. The genotyping accomplished in collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco will roughly double the number of individuals in the United States available to researchers for genome-wide association studies.

A separate NIH GO grant of nearly $4 million was awarded to the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research (Portland, Oregon), to study personalized medicine and genomic tests for colon cancer. Researchers will use the grant money to evaluate two tests, one that determines whether colon cancer patients will respond to a commonly prescribed drug and another that tests for a genetic mutation that dramatically increases the chance of developing colon cancer.