A Medical Device Daily

Home Diagnostics (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) reported an agreement to be the exclusive supplier of a co-branded blood glucose monitoring system for Rite Aid (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) drug stores. Home Diagnostics’ TRUEtrack will be available as the TRUEtrack for Rite Aid blood glucose monitoring system at 5,000 Rite Aid stores across the U.S. starting in March.

TRUEtrack uses biosensor and chip coding technology to generate accurate results in 10 seconds from a single microliter of blood. The TRUEtrack meter and test strips typically cost up to 30% less than other systems, the company said, and are covered by Medicare and most insurance plans.

In other agreement news: Genomic Health (Redwood City, California) has partnered with Pfizer (New York) on the development of a genomic test to estimate the risk of recurrence following surgery for patients with Stage I-III renal carcinoma, clear cell type that has not spread to other parts of the body.

The clear cell type of renal carcinoma is the most common type of kidney cancer in adults, affecting an estimated 25,000 people each year in the U.S. As part of the collaboration, the companies will apply the same molecular technology and clinical strategy Genomic Health used to develop its Oncotype DX breast cancer test.

In other agreements:

• NanoString Technologies (Seattle) said it has signed a second Early-Access Agreement for its nCounter Analysis System for digital gene expression with the Genome Sequencing Center at the Washington University School of Medicine.

The nCounter Analysis System uses digital technology that enables direct multi-plexed measurement of gene expression and offers high levels of sensitivity and precision, including detection of fractional fold change differences, a feature unique to this platform. The technology uses molecular barcodes and single molecule imaging to detect and count hundreds of unique transcripts in a single reaction. The system features a step-by-step guide to perform the analysis on a touch screen.

The automated system is designed for researchers seeking to validate gene expression signatures, working with small amounts of starting material or studying defined gene sets. The system is comprised of an automated sample prep station, a digital analyzer, the CodeSet (molecular barcodes) and all other reagents needed to perform the analysis. The CodeSets can assay hundreds of gene transcripts per reaction.

Washington University researchers will use the nCounter first for a large-scale diabetes study by Dr. James Cheverud to validate the expression of over 50 genes across 15 tissues in over 900 samples.

“We chose the nCounter Analysis System because of the high quality of data generated from the system and the fact that we couldn’t do this study with competing methods,” said Cheverud. “If we wanted to perform this study with QPCR it would have been over 55,000 individual reactions. We can complete the entire study on the nCounter Analysis System in about 900 reactions and in a fraction of the time.”

NanoString is a life sciences tool company developing technologies for creating molecular barcodes for tagging individual molecules in a biological sample.