A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Zila (Phoenix) said it has selected Panadent (Orpington, UK) to be the exclusive distributor of ViziLite Plus with TBlue, Zila's oral cancer screening product, in the UK and Ireland.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Panadent launched ViziLite Plus at the British Dental Conference & Exhibition, the British Dental Association's annual conference, in Manchester, UK, early this month.

David Bethune, chairman/CEO of Zila, said, "Panadent's specialty in selling dental products to dentists and hygienists through education, technical expertise and service will make them an effective marketer of ViziLite Plus. The UK market represents a significant opportunity for Zila and establishes a solid foothold for expanding throughout the rest of Europe."

Peter Gowers, managing director of Panadent, said, "ViziLite Plus is a much-needed oral cancer screening product for patients in the UK. Given that 25% of oral cancers occur in people who do not smoke and have no other behavioral risk factors, it is imperative that every adult, particularly those at high risk for oral cancer, be screened at least once a year."

ViziLite Plus uses a chemiluminescent light source and a pharmaceutical-grade vital tissue dye, TBlue, to help dentists and dental technicians identify and evaluate abnormalities in the mouth that could harbor pathologic changes.

Diagnostic inspection device developed

China Sky One Medical (Harbin, China), a pharmaceutical company for over-the-counter drugs in China, reported the development of a semi-quantitative automatic inspection device for its diagnostic kits.

Harbin First Bio-Engineering, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Sky One Medical, has developed a series of diagnostic kits under the support of the Chinese government that it said "significantly improve" the accuracy of early cancer detection.

The company said that in order to interpret the results from these kits, physicians must use advanced equipment with which very few hospitals in China are equipped. As a result, China Sky One collaborated with Harbin Institute of Technology Machinery and Automation College to develop a semi-quantitative automatic inspection system for its diagnostic kits to aid physicians in interpreting the results.

The new inspection system uses transferred photoelectron technology, simplifying the diagnostic process. The company said the new device should stimulate faster adoption of its diagnostic kits.

The device, for which China Sky One Medical holds the applicable patent, has been submitted to the State Food and Drug Administration for approval.

Yan-Qing Liu, chairman/CEO of China Sky One, said, "We believe that by combining our kits with the inspection device, it will promote wider adoption of the kits by healthcare professionals and make a meaningful contribution to our revenue in the future. The sales model of bundling diagnostic kits with the inspection device will help to maintain profits and increase our competitiveness going forward."