A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Clarity Imaging International (San Diego) has launched its mobile DEXA program in Texas. Additionally, the company said it has amended its service agreement with Genesis Physician Group (Dallas), an independent physician association with more than 1,500 participating physicians that provide services throughout North Texas and will include this service.

John Relic, president of Clarity, said, “Adding the mobile DEXA service to our existing agreement with Genesis fulfills our strategic goals of offering primary care physicians’ services. These services are provided by the physician to the patient, therefore reducing the need to refer.”

Clarity introduces diagnostic and imaging technologies, providing in-office diagnostic services and offering medical imaging center development, consultation and management.

Genesis is a developer of collaborative business and clinical initiatives.

In other agreements:

• Biomoda (Albuquerque, New Mexico), maker of early lung cancer detection testing and other cancer diagnostic technology, reported an agreement with Quintiles Consulting (Rockville, Maryland) for regulatory consulting and design of clinical studies of Biomoda’s test for detection of early lung cancer as part of the company’s clinical programs.

“Quintiles has the experience, skills and understanding of the full range of review perspectives that bear on agency evaluations of new medical tests and devices,” said John Cousins, president of Biomoda. “They will provide guidance, input and review to structure protocol, data content and collection and other information relative to making sure information is gathered in appropriate formats for future FDA submittals by our company.”

Quintiles Consulting is the regulatory consulting unit of Quintiles Transnational. It helps companies navigate regulatory challenges and improve efficiencies from early discovery through commercialization. It provides advice and strategies in the areas of product development, regulatory submissions and compliance, bioresearch monitoring, quality systems, validation, and pricing and reimbursement.

Biomoda’s technology is based on the porphyrin application that binds to cancerous or aberrant cells extracted from lung sputum samples. Cancerous cells glow red under fluorescent light to allow detection under a microscope. The technology, a noninvasive cytology based assay, is designed for cancer screening of large populations at a reasonable cost.

• E-Z-EM (Lake Success, New York) reported that Amerinet (St. Louis) has added the company’s EmpowerMR injector system to the nonexclusive purchasing agreement currently in place for its Empower line of CT injector systems.

This agreement is the first to include EmpowerMR injectors with a major group purchase organization, and will provide Amerinet’s more than 2,100 hospital members access to preferred contract pricing for EmpowerMR injectors. The three-year agreement is effective as of Sept. 15, 2007.

EmpowerMR uses a hydraulic control system instead of the shielded electrical control components used by most other MR injector systems. EmpowerMR has no shielded iron motors, piezoelectric motors or electrically active motor control circuitry next to the scanner, which significantly minimizes the prospect of electrical interference with the scanner’s magnetic field. EmpowerMR is also not battery operated, and links to its electrical supply by a single pass-through cable that does not require special shielding. Because there is no motor in the MR suite, EmpowerMR does not generate audible noise.

Commenting on the release, Anthony Lombardo, president/CEO of E-Z-EM, said, “This agreement extends to Amerinet’s membership the same opportunity for preferred pricing for our EmpowerMR injector system as they now enjoy for our other Empower products.”

E-Z-EM is a manufacturer of contrast agents for gastrointestinal radiology.

• High Throughput Genomics (HTG; Tucson, Arizona), a provider of microplate-based gene expression assay technology and services for the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, reported a collaboration agreement with the University of California at San Diego (UCSD; San Diego) Department of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism.

HTG and UCSD will collaborate to generate novel arrays using tissue samples from mice as well as various cell lysates to evaluate genes responsible for inflammation and insulin production using HTG’s qNPA quantitative Nuclease Protection Assay technology. Dr. Jerry Olefsky is the lead collaborator on the project for UCSD.

One of the key goals for this research program is to study mechanisms of insulin resistance and how inflammation is involved in the pathogenesis of diabetes. Having genes on the array that are markers for inflammation is an effective way for UCSD to assess biomarkers and study the genes in question.

“We are excited about the utility of HTG’s technology platform for a number of reasons including cost effectiveness and time savings by having multiple genes analyzed simultaneously,” said Dr. Jerry Olefsky. “The reliability and reproducibility of the technology will enable our research team to move through our project with great ease and confidence.”

High Throughput Genomics provides qNPA technology and services for the life sciences industry.