• Angiotech Pharmaceuticals (Vancouver, British Columbia) has launched its Quill SRS Monoderm product, which it said is intended primarily for superficial wound closure applications and indicated for soft-tissue approximation where use of an absorbable suture is appropriate. The product will be available immediately for sale in the U.S. and Europe. Dr. William Hunter, president/CEO, said Monoderm will complement Quill SRS, "which currently targets deeper layers of wound closure." Angiotech is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medical device company.

Bayer Diabetes Care (Tarrytown, New York) unveiled at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Francisco its new Contour blood glucose meter with enhanced testing features that can be personalized to best meet patients' individual treatment needs. In addition to the new meter, Bayer introduced a redesigned Microlet2 lancing system and new product packaging. In addition to Bayer's No Coding technology, small sample size and fast testing time, the company said the updated Contour is "the only meter that offers patients the flexibility to choose either 'Basic' or 'Advanced' levels of testing, to keep the management of their diabetes as simple and specific as they would like." The new, personalized features include programmable testing reminders and pre- and post-meal markers that provide information on how a meal can affect blood glucose, a feature particularly helpful for self-adjusting insulin users. The advanced settings also allow users to set their own high and low blood glucose targets to fit their management needs and provide personal 7-, 14- and 30-day testing averages.

BioMedical Enterprises (BME; San Antonio), a developer of orthopedic shape memory implant technology, reported the launch of the Barbed OSStaple (BOSS), a nitinol implant designed for internal fixation of bone. The BOSS features barbs on the legs for bone adhesion. The nitinol staple changes shape when heated above body temperature using BME's OSSforce Implant Controller, to provide compression between two bones. The company said the BOSS product is ideal for upper and lower extremity procedures, especially when surgeons want the added security of barbed legs to stabilize the implant. A national launch of the Barbed OSStaple will begin at the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society summer meeting in Denver June 25-28.

GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin) said it would be showcasing the company's new single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging applications, positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) MotionFree technologies, and new pre-clinical imaging and radiopharmaceutical offerings at the annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, which began Sunday in New Orleans. Rounding out GE Healthcare's presence is an Innovation Center that will showcase future generation imaging technologies. GE is launching two "breakthrough" software packages on the company's flagship 4-slice SPECT/CT, the Infinia Hawkeye 4. The new Volumetrix Suite consists of two applications that deliver image clarity and diagnostic confidence with precise detection and localization of disease, the Volumetrix 3D and Volumetrix IR. Volumetrix 3D brings together the convenience of advanced 3-D visualization with the productivity and ease of traditional 2-D image analysis. Volumetrix IR offers a clinician the choice of virtually any CT to view registered to the SPECT data, all within the nuclear medicine workflow. Highlighting GE's PET/CT presence at SNM 2008 is the Discovery platform, optimized for advanced clinical applications.

PAL Health Technologies (Pekin, Illinois) reported the launch of the Xtremityscan system, a digital shape acquisition system that allows doctors of podiatary medicine and other practitioners to acquire 3-D foot shapes in mere seconds, without the messy, time-consuming plaster casting process formerly used to obtain the same information. The Xtremityscan system is available in two models — a mobile cart-based scanning system that operates wirelessly and can move between treatment rooms, and a portable model that can travel among multiple offices. Specially-designed software captures an image of the plantar surface of the foot. Advanced imaging software then creates a three-dimensional model of the image.