A Medical Device Daily

Insulet (Bedford, Massachusetts), a leader in wearable insulin pump technology with its OmniPod Insulin Management System, reported an agreement with Ferring Pharmaceuticals (Saint Prex, Switzerland) to develop the OmniPod System for the delivery of a Ferring drug.

This is Insulet's first development agreement for a non-diabetes drug delivery application.

Ferring will fund development of a custom version of the OmniPod Personal Diabetes Manager and, upon completion of the development, will agree to purchase minimum quantities of the OmniPod Systems over a five-year period, beginning in 2009.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Duane DeSisto, president/CEO of Insulet, said, "We are pleased to partner with Ferring to develop an OmniPod for the delivery of a women's health treatment, as a first step toward expanded applications of the OmniPod System for drug delivery. We believe the OmniPod System can be an effective platform technology for the delivery of other drugs that require continuous or frequent infusions."

In other agreement news:

Roche NimbleGen (Basel, Switzerland), a unit of Roche Applied Science (Indianapolis), reported that it has formed a strategic alliance with BioDiscovery (Los Angeles) to offer solutions to comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) microarray customers.

The new high-density 2.1 million probe (HD2) arrays of Roche NimbleGen combined with software known as Nexus Copy Number, of BioDiscovery, bring power and ease in whole-genome CGH analysis, according to the companies.

As part of this alliance, Roche NimbleGen and BioDiscovery will co-market and co-promote their products and services to scientists worldwide. The companies also plan to present data generated from NimbleGen CGH arrays using Nexus software of BioDiscovery to the research community through a series of seminars.

"This alliance with BioDiscovery will enable Roche NimbleGen to significantly enhance the customer experience by providing complete data analysis solutions for our customers using NimbleGen arrays for CGH analysis," said Srini Ramachandra, senior director for software marketing at Roche NimbleGen. "At the same time, we are excited about the opportunity to develop a strong business relationship with BioDiscovery in offering complete solutions to our customers in genomics and life sciences."

• Sciona (Boulder, Colorado), which calls itself "a pioneer in the science of Personal Genetics for lifestyle and nutritional guidance," reported a collaboration with the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) to develop a new software platform named RE2, using Microsoft's latest application platform and development tools.

Sciona said RE2 "marries state-of-the-art technology with the burgeoning science of Personal Genetics, and expands exponentially the possibilities of the software applications."

"This project is a prime example of the value of software in the Personal Genetics industry," said Patrick Malone of Microsoft Hellas in Greece. "The teams from NTUA and Sciona skillfully combined our latest technologies, including Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5 and the soon-to-be-released SQL Server 2008, to create a very scalable, customizable and secure software platform. Working with the new Microsoft Office document format, Open XML, they managed to present the processed results in a human-readable and understandable way, giving clear and actionable advice to their customers, based on their genetic profile."

• CellCyte Genetics (Bothell, Washington) has selected the Cardiovascular Phenotyping Core at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis) to perform a study to further evaluate CellCyte's glycoprotein products. The goal of the study is to investigate the efficiency of CellCyte's glycoprotein products in a preclinical model of myocardial infarction.

"We look forward to working with the scientific team at Washington University on this study, which will continue to advance the research and development efforts for our glycoprotein products," said Ronald Berninger, PhD, chief scientific officer at CellCyte. "These are highly experienced researchers, as demonstrated by the fact that they perform more than 6,000 surgical and imaging procedures annually. Outsourcing a portion of the preclinical work allows us to move our program forward more quickly and is complementary to our in-house scientific efforts."