A Medical Device Daily

Life Technologies (Carlsbad, California) and Nanosys (San Francisco) reported a cross-licensing agreement to share rights to an intellectual property estate related to fluorescent nanocrystals (also known as quantum dots). New products developed as a result of this agreement will help prevent counterfeiting worldwide.

The quantum dots will allow manufacturers to trace the source of their materials and manage and track product shipments, helping stop counterfeit material use in pharmaceutical and diagnostic products, food and beverages (and their agricultural and environmental sources), and electronic goods, reducing counterfeiting of currency, documents, fine art, and luxury goods.

Quantum dots are tiny (nanometer size) fluorescent particles. While invisible to the eye, they emit intensely bright light when exposed to low-cost violet or ultraviolet light sources. Quantum dots display unique colors due to differences in size. Due to their particulate nature, quantum dots can easily be blended with polymers, gels, or inks and printed onto most surfaces.

The complexity of their manufacturing process also makes them almost impossible to counterfeit. And, because quantum dots are highly stable, extremely bright and absorptive, they offer advancements in solid state lighting, solar collector and electronic display technology.

"Life Technologies' quantum dots are currently being used in life science research and pathology, but there are vast opportunities to use them in a wide variety of applications," said Paul Grossman, senior vice president of corporate development & strategy at Life Technologies. "Our new partnership with Nanosys will allow both companies to expand the opportunities for our combined technologies, and further the reach of Life Technologies into the applied markets."

Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove said, "We are very excited to be partnering with Life Technologies to use our combined nanotechnology to address the growing and pervasive problem of counterfeit goods. By working together with Life Technologies, we can now offer comprehensive solutions and technology licensing to our customers to help them use our unique quantum dot materials for anti-counterfeiting."

The combination of the two companies' intellectual property estates includes more than 270 patents and applications, including 84 issued U.S. patents, for use of fluorescent nanocrystals. The licenses will allow both Life Technologies and Nanosys to work with a variety of manufacturers who want to protect their products from counterfeiting.

Nanosys is currently using quantum dot technology to produce devices such as LEDs, photovoltaics and electronic displays, while Life Technologies is focused on life science applications, including in vitro and in vivo cell imaging, flow cytometry, tumor margin detection, and protein detection.

The worldwide counterfeit goods trade, excluding counterfeit money, is believed to be on the order of $1 trillion annually.

In other agreements/contracts news:

• Icor Partners (Arlington, Virginia) said it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office for Enterprise Development to provide Information Resource Management and Integrated Program Planning support.

Under the contract, Icor will continue to provide cross program integration, integrated program planning and program executive office support to further the objective of transforming service to veterans through sustaining and modernizing the VA information technology.

• Siemens Healthcare (Deerfield, Illinois) and Sysmex (Kobe, Japan) have reported signing a five-year contract renewal for a global supply, distributorship, sales and service agreement. Under the agreement, clinical laboratory customers around the world continue to have access to the largest portfolio of coagulation instruments and tests. The companies will also continue joint product development activities ensuring customers have continued access to new coagulation technology.

• QuadraMed (Reston, Virginia) said that Fremont-Rideout Health Group (FRHG; Yuba City, California) chose QuadraMed Revenue Cycle and Quantim Health Information Management solutions to streamline its revenue collection process, improve clinical workflow, and leverage business intelligence and real-time reporting to help maximize operational efficiencies. FRHG will begin deployment of the QuadraMed Revenue Cycle and Quantim solution suites this month and plans to go live in July 2010.

• McKesson (Alpharetta, Georgia) recently signed a three-year agreement with VHA (Irving, Texas) in which VHA has selected the McKesson Performance Analytics product as its preferred enterprise business intelligence solution. This contract also offers preferential pricing for VHA members, including discounts for more than 1,400 not-for-profit hospitals and 23,000 non-acute care organizations.

The McKesson Performance Analytics software provides hospitals and health systems with a financial decision support system that integrates and transforms data from the clinical care process to measure organizational performance.