A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Quintiles Transnational (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina) said it has acquired Targeted Molecular Diagnostics (TMD; Westmont, Illinois). According to Quintiles, the addition of TMD strengthens Quintiles' service offerings in oncology, an increasingly important growth area of drug development. It provides strong capabilities in tissue-based testing, a critical component of the modern oncology drug development process.

"This acquisition is a logical addition to Quintiles' service offerings," said Tom Wollman, senior vice president, Quintiles Global Central Laboratories. "It provides us with advanced in-house pathology capabilities, including telepathology," he said. "Most importantly, TMD's knowledge in biomarker expression analysis adds significant new proficiencies sought by our customers."

TMD's biomarker technology will help Quintiles' customers better understand how their drugs work and in which populations they're most likely to perform best. "With the addition of TMD's expertise, we can help customers develop novel, targeted cancer therapies and get them to market much faster by employing biomarkers in the development process," said King Jolly, senior VP of drug development partnerships for NovaQuest, the managed partnership group of Quintiles. "We are currently working with large pharmaceutical companies on the design of development programs. TMD will enhance our capabilities to meet those companies' needs."

TMD is a private, oncology-focused, specialty diagnostic laboratory serving the drug development process. The company says it provides guidance through biomarker expression analysis and supports the development of numerous targeted therapies in oncology.

Quintiles says it is "powering the next generation of healthcare" by providing a broad range of professional services in drug development, strategic partnering and commercialization for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries.

Fujifilm Medical Systems (Stamford, Connecticut) reported the acquisition of Empiric Systems (Morrisville, North Carolina). Fujifilm has acquired 100% of the Empiric stock, making the vendor a wholly owned Fujifilm subsidiary. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Empiric acquisition follows Fujifilm's 2007 acquisition of ProSolv CardioVascular into the Synapse portfolio, Fujifilm noted. According to the company, it is the first major vendor to deliver seamless, Web-based access to all mammography and cardiovascular images and information, as well as to all RIS data and reports, from one workstation, with a single sign-on and familiar user interface.

In other dealmaking news, Revolutions Medical (RevMed; Mount Pleasant, South Carolina) reported that it has completed its merger with Clear Image (Lexington, Massachusetts) and now owns 100% of all its proprietary technological assets.

The company said this allows it to move ahead with the development and delivery of the platform for its MRI software technologies. RevMed's MRI software will be DICOM-compatible and should easily be adaptable to current picture archival computer systems (PACS).

Having MRIs viewed not only in black and white on current PACS but by using RevMed's color and 3-D automatic segmentation software could boost the reliability and confidence of radiologists, the company said.

RevMed first disclosed its plans to acquire Clear Image last year for $9 million.