A Medical Device Daily

Signalife (Greenville, South Carolina) reported that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued to the company a patent entitled "System For, And Method Of, Monitoring Heartbeats Of A Patient," covering 37 claims.

In conjunction with granting of the patent, the company said it will evaluate the filing a continuation or continuation-in-part application for the purpose of pursuing additional claim coverage in the technology that may have occurred since the time of the original filing.

Signalife is focused on the monitoring, detection and prevention of disease through continuous biomedical signal monitoring.

In other patent news: StemCells (Palo Alto, California) reported that the USPTO has issued to it Patent No. 7,361,505 with claims covering human neural stem cells derived from any tissue source, including embryonic, fetal, juvenile, or adult tissue. The '505 patent is exclusively licensed to StemCells.

"The issuance of this patent rounds out and strengthens our neural stem cell portfolio, which we believe is unparalleled in its breadth, depth and completeness," said Martin McGlynn, president/CEO of StemCells. "We are confident that any third party wishing to commercialize neural stem cells as potential therapeutics or to use them as drug screening tools will have to seek a license from us, irrespective of how they derive the cells. We have already granted licenses to several companies and are currently considering licensing others."

StemCells is a clinical-stage biotech developing cell-based therapeutics to treat diseases of the central nervous system and liver.