A Medical Device Daily

Enigma Diagnostics (Porton Down, UK), a point-of-care molecular diagnostics company, reported that it has signed two patent license agreements with Roche Molecular Systems (RMS; Branchburg, New Jersey). Financial terms were not disclosed.

The licenses, signed on July 15, provide Enigma full access under patents owned or licensed by RMS and its affiliates to practice HybProbe real-time PCR chemistry and melt analysis and will allow Enigma to commercialize HybProbe PCR tests for human and veterinary in vitro diagnostics on a worldwide basis. The two licenses with RMS complement Enigma's existing patent portfolio as well as intellectual property licensed by Celera Diagnostics (Alameda, California) for real-time PCR thermal cyclers.

Enigma is currently developing a series of highly multiplexed, HybProbe assays for its infectious disease programs including pandemic and seasonal influenza, chlamydia and MRSA. These tests will be combined with Enigma's fully automated real-time PCR system, the Enigma ML (mini-laboratory), enabling 'test and treat' molecular diagnostics at the point-of-care.

Health Robotics in i.v.Station accord

Health Robotics (Bozen, Italy) said that it has signed a definitive agreement with Charite-Universitatsmedizin Berlin. Charite will install an i.v.Station robot at its Centrum 14 during the second half of 2009.

The primary challenges in today's IV admixture operations are serious medication errors, high costs, turn-around time, waste, regulatory issues, lack of audit trails, motion injuries, space constraints and difficulty in maintaining adequate and trained clinical staff. The i.v.Station robot is desgined to automatically compound non-hazardous IV doses and deliver them to the hospital staff in a ready-to-administer format for antibiotics, pain therapy, anti-virals, epidurals, and other IV and injectable doses. i.v.Station was designed to address the above-mentioned industry-challenges, and to overcome the fact that until now, the range of products and technology available to mitigate these issues has consisted of variations on the IV "piggyback" bag, outsourcing of IVs, and mid-1990s-developed automated solutions that have seen very limited adoption and success.

"i.v.Station represents a revolutionary approach in the quest for safe, accurate, efficient, and cost effective I.V. Admixtures. It offers unprecedented error reduction, accuracy and sterility benefits, nursing staff labor savings, all within a scalable and fail-safe architecture. We are delighted to be the first German hospital to test the exciting new technology of i.v.Station robot," said Hartmut Radtke, chief of production of blood products at Charite-Universitatsmedizin Berlin.

Health Robotics is a supplier of life-critical intra-venous medication preparation, compounding, and dispensing robots, providing healthcare facilities around the world with robotic technology and software automation solutions.

ExonHit reports final results of fund raise

ExonHit Therapeutics (Paris) reported the final results of the fund raising transaction by exercise of warrants issued and awarded freely to its shareholders on Dec. 24, 2008 (the warrants 08/09).

Ten warrants 08/09 gave their holders the right to subscribe for one new share at €3.50 on or before June 30. Over the warrant exercise period, i.e., from Dec. 24, 2008 through June 30, 2009, out of a total of 26,877,950 warrants issued, 4,143,840 warrants 08/09 have been exercised. The warrants 08/09 which had not been exercised by June 30, 2009 have been cancelled.

"These additional funds will further strengthen our cash position and contribute to the financing of our development programs," said Dr. Lo c Maurel, president of the management board of ExonHit.

ExonHit raised €1,450,344 through the exercise of the warrants 08/09 leading to the issue of 414,384 new shares. This amount will contribute to ExonHit's cash position which corresponds to 24 months of activity.

ExonHit is an emerging company active in both therapeutics and diagnostics. The company is applying its proprietary technology, based on the analysis of alternative RNA splicing, to develop blood-based diagnostic tests and therapeutics for neurodegenerative and cancer indications.

BioTrove's 1st RapidFire installed in Europe

BioTrove (Woburn, Massachusetts) reported that its RapidFire High-Throughput Mass Spectrometry (RF-MS) screening platform was installed in its first European customer site at Boehringer Ingelheim (Biberach, Germany). The RapidFire system, which is being used for expanded in vitro ADME applications at Boehringer Ingelheim recently received CE and ETL marks acknowledging mandated health, safety and environmental requirements were met, enabling marketing distribution across the European Union and in Canada. A second RapidFire system was also installed at Boehringer Ingelheim's Laval, Quebec site.

"RapidFire has allowed us to greatly streamline our workflow – our high-throughput screening of in vitro ADME samples is much faster using RapidFire than with our previous methods," said Andreas Luippold, Lab Head (Department of Drug Discovery Support), Boehringer Ingelheim. "BioTrove's RapidFire system will be an integral part of our drug discovery research helping us to focus our research efforts and resources on the best candidate compounds. Furthermore, the system helps us to be well prepared for future demands in the field of in vitro ADME."

RapidFire provides label-free, biologically relevant data enabling researchers to identify lead compounds without the need for surrogate substrates. The company said it is significantly faster than traditional HPLC methods, providing mass spectrometry quality data at speeds approaching that of plate reader-based methods.

BioTrove offers two technology platforms: OpenArray, which advances genomic research in a wide range of life science fields, including agriculture, disease research, and public health, and RapidFire, which enables the acceleration of drug discovery and pipeline decisions.