A Medical Device Daily

St. Jude Medical (St. Paul, Minnesota) said it has been awarded a Cardiac Rhythm Management (CRM) contract with Premier Purchasing Partners (San Diego).

The contract is a two-year award that began Oct. 1.

St. Jude began its CRM relationship with Premier in 2004 through pacemaker and implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) contract awards. The new contract will include the complete line of St. Jude’s CRM products, including the expanding line of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) products, the company said.

Premier serves 1,700 hospitals and more than 47,000 other healthcare sites.

St. Jude has five major focus areas that include: CRM, atrial fibrillation, cardiac surgery, cardiology and neuromodulation.

In grant news:

• Tiny new drugs that target cancer-causing genes and early warning systems that flag cancer’s recurrence are among the goals of a planned research center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, Massachusetts) that got a $100 million infusion this week.

David Koch, an MIT alumnus and prostate cancer survivor, has agreed to donate the money toward a $240 million center intended to bring together biologists and engineers to improve detection, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, MIT said. Half of the donation will go for construction costs and half will pay for research. The university is raising the rest of the money from other donors and through loans. The center is expected to open in 2010 on Main Street in the heart of the Cambridge campus.

According to university officials, the gift is the fifth largest to MIT.

MIT said it has focused most of its cancer research on understanding the underlying disease mechanisms rather than on finding cures. Yet, the work of its scientists laid the groundwork for at least two drugs, Herceptin and Gleevec, and the university said it believes that more direct collaboration among its scientists could bring even greater benefits.

“We’re going to merge cancer discovery with a real focus on cancer solutions,” said Tyler Jacks, an MIT biology professor who will head the new Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

The initiative is part of a growing effort at MIT and across the country to focus on interdisciplinary approaches to diseases, the university said.

MIT said its new building would house about 500 scientists and staff members and the laboratories of 25 professors, including biologist and Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp and chemical engineer Robert Langer, a 2006 winner of the National Medal of Science.

One of the center’s projects, Jacks said, will be to build on the work of Langer and Sharp to “develop smart bombs for cancer, instead of carpet bombs.”

Currently most cancer treatments kill large numbers of healthy cells. Langer and other MIT engineers are designing tiny substances called nanoparticles that could carry medicine directly to cancer cells. Meanwhile, Sharp and colleagues have been developing a potential treatment to shut off cancer-causing genes. If the two approaches could be married in a safe and targeted treatment, Jacks said, “it would completely revolutionize how we treat cancer.”

Another effort will focus on developing devices that could be placed in a patient following successful treatment to monitor any return of the cancer, Jacks said.

The center will also focus on discovering the underlying causes of cancer’s spread and on researching how tumors evade detection by the body’s natural disease-fighting mechanisms.

Koch, an MIT board member for nearly 20 years, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1992. The billionaire was moved to donate to cancer research as he adjusted to his cancer diagnosis. He has given millions of dollars for research at hospitals and cancer centers nationwide and had previously donated $30 million to MIT.

• Researchers from National Jewish Medical and Research Center (Denver) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston) have been awarded a $37 million grant from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to lead what it calls the most comprehensive study of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) ever undertaken.

The multi-institutional study will seek to identify the genetic, epidemiological and radiological characteristics of COPD, with a long-term goal of better understanding the disease and finding more effective treatments.

The 16 clinical study centers involved will enroll a total of 10,500 participants, 3,500 of whom will be African American, a population whose COPD rates are rapidly growing and whose risk factors have not been adequately studied, according to National Jewish.

The new study will enroll smokers with and without COPD. Study participants with COPD will undergo a single study visit that will include pulmonary function tests, questionnaires about respiratory and general health, a six-minute walk test, a physical examination and a chest CT scan. After study participation, phone and mail contacts will be conducted with study participants every six months.

A team from Johns Hopkins University, the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Colorado will provide statistical analysis.