Imagine that near-fatal accident during rush hour in the middle of a heavily populated city. An ambulance gets to the scene through heavy traffic, but it’s unlikely the vehicle would be able to get you to the nearest hospital in time.

The only alternative: an air “ambulance” is called in, a helicopter — leaping over all that rush hour traffic to save a life.

“Helicopters offer an unrestricted line of sight,” Don Hubbard, a completions manager at Texas Aviation Services (TAS; Fort Worth, Texas) told Medical Device Daily. “The quickest way from point A to point B is a straight line — that’s what you get with a helicopter.”

TAS, a helicopter technical services company, said it is boosting its service offerings to airborne EMS helicopter operations and hospitals.

It has teamed with Lifeport (Woodland, Washington) for new medical interior configurations, expanding its technical workforce, and investing for broader technical capacities at its Fort Worth facilities in order to take on more air ambulance rotorcraft projects, the company said.

Hubbard said develops “flying ambulances” that are equipped with a wide array of medical equipment for a range of life-saving offerings: multiple stretchers and mounting devices, defibrillators and monitors. Added to this are communications devices to allow the air medical crew to coordinate with the hospital about the patient’s status.

Besides responding to emergency scenes, the company’s helicopters also provide hospital-to-hospital transportation, Hubbard said.

TAS has performed 96 new “completions” for EMS fleet operators in the past 10 years, according to Tim Woodward, the company’s president. He said the company’s most recent air ambulance helicopter was delivered to Omniflight (Addison, Texas).

“TAS has over 20 years of experience in creating flying emergency rooms for air medical customers,” said Steve Townes, chairman of TAS and its parent company, Ranger Aerospace and Aeronautics (Grapevine, Texas). “Our strategic teaming with Lifeport, combined with Ranger’s proven access to growth capital, means we can focus even more on the unique needs of our air medical customers.”

In other new ventures: BioReliance (Rockville, Maryland) said it has contracted with Gentronix (Manchester, UK) to offer Gentronix’s GreenScreen HC in vitro assay as part of its portfolio of genotoxicity screening services.

GreenScreen HC, in conjunction with Ames II assays, is designed to allow pharmaceutical companies to test for geneotoxic potential earlier in the preclinical development process, using only a few milligrams of test compound as opposed to the gram quantities required by current ICH regulatory tests, according to the company.

GreenScreen HC is human cell-based genotoxicity screening assay that links the regulation of human Growth Arrest and DNA Damage gene to the production of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), the company said. Cells that have incurred DNA damage upon exposure to a test compound express higher levels of detectable GFP.

The GreenScreen HC requires only 1 mg of “starting” material to demonstrate high specificity, in contrast to other in vitro genetic toxicology assays that often provide false positive results, according to Gentronix.

Gentronix develops tools for the drug-discovery field.