A Medical Device Daily

Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals (Denver) reported that it has entered into a joint development agreement (JDA) with MAST BioSurgery (San Diego) for the development of one or more new surgical products incorporating Ceragenix's CeraShield antimicrobial technology. MAST will have exclusive rights to develop specified products and negotiate terms for these products for a period of six months.

Ceragenix said that this is the first joint development and exclusive licensing option that it has entered into for a medical device application of its CeraShield technology.

Steven Porter, CEO/chairman of Ceragenix said the agreement targets "long-term protection of in-dwelling medical devices with an innovative surgical medical device firm like MAST BioSurgery. It is our expectation that we will enter into several other similar agreements for different devices during the remainder of 2009."

Count Lukas Bluecher, co-founder/CEO of MAST, said, "We are thrilled about the opportunity to combine our product line with the highly innovative CeraShield antimicrobial agent ..."

In other agreements and contracts news:

• Bio-Matrix Scientific Group (BMSN; San Diego) and Entest BioMedical, BMSN's wholly-owned subsidiary, reported that a contract has been signed with Brian Koos, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles, for the development and validation of a screening test for gestational diabetes, a glucose intolerance in pregnant women.

Koos is the developer of the test which is licensed to Entest by UCLA.

Entest is the exclusive licensee for the test, billed as able to mitigate the lengthy process of diagnosing gestational diabetes. The companies said that their goal is to develop a large scale sampling for validation of the screening test with FDA, for marketing to hospitals and medical clinics.

• Applied Biosystems (Carlsbad, California), a division of Life Technologies (Foster City, California), and Geospiza (Seattle), reported the launch of a genetic analysis solution for those using advanced genomic analysis platforms.

The organizations said they are combining forces to offer the life science industry's first jointly offered genomic analysis cloud-computing solution, an approach in which dynamically scalable and often virtual resources are provided over the Internet.

• Premier Purchasing Partners (San Diego) reported that a new agreement for revenue cycle solutions has been awarded to Craneware (Orlando, Florida). Effective April 1 the agreement is available to acute care and continuum of care members of the Premier healthcare alliance.

• Siemens Healthcare (Deerfield, Illinois) said it has donated laboratory instruments and diagnostic tests to the Kidney Early Evaluation community outreach program of the National Kidney Foundation's (New York) to help reduce the number of individuals that develop chronic kidney disease.

The program raises awareness in the U.S. about early detection of kidney disease and screens, at no charge, high-risk individuals.