A Medical Device Daily

Perlegen Sciences (Mountain View, California) reported it has formed a personalized medicine collaboration with an undisclosed electronic medical records (EMR) provider to identify and develop genetic markers to help predict how patients are likely to respond to specific medical treatments.

Perlegen and its partner will mine data from the EMR’s information warehouse, which, it said, contains clinical treatment and outcome data on roughly 4 million patients, to enable the identification of subsets of patient records which meet highly specific inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Working via each patient’s individual care provider, Perlegen will then seek to obtain DNA from these patients in a HIPAA-compliant manner to help physicians address various medical situations in which genetically-based predictions about treatment response may help significantly improve patient care.

Perlegen said that patient selection and DNA collection has already begun for its initial diagnostic programs, with additional sample collection programs scheduled to begin in the coming months.

Perlegen will have exclusive access to the EMR’s database of U.S. records for the purpose of assessing and selecting patients from whom appropriate samples could be collected. The EMR provider will earn subscription and program fees, as well as significant participation in milestone payments tied to the successful launch of new diagnostic tests resulting from the collaboration. Perlegen will receive an ownership position in the EMR provider tied to the achievement of certain revenue levels.

In other agreements news:

• Cardinal Health (Dublin, Ohio) and GE Healthcare (Wauwatosa, Wisconsin) reported an agreement concerning the availability of GE’s Myoview (Tetrofosmin) cardiac imaging agent through Cardinal’s network of nuclear pharmacies.

The agreement will give Cardinal’s customers greater access to Myoview, a myocardial perfusion imaging technetium agent used in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease.

“With this agreement, Myoview will over time become the flagship branded cardiac imaging agent offered through Cardinal Health’s nuclear pharmacies,” said John Rademacher, president, Nuclear and Specialty Pharmacy Services for Cardinal.

Cardinal operates a radiopharmacy network with more than 150 nuclear pharmacy locations.

John Chiminski, president/CEO of Medical Diagnostics at GE, said, “Myoview has been a strong and growing brand in the nuclear cardiac imaging market for more than a decade, and partnering to bring it to Cardinal Health’s radiopharmacies will help clinicians reach even more patients.”