A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Beckman Coulter (BC; Fullerton, California) has been awarded a grant by the Imperial College London to develop a point-of-care (POC) test for monitoring CD4 lymphocytes in patients with HIV/AIDS, needed in resource-poor countries like sub-Saharan Africa to assess prognosis and aid in treatment decisions for HIV/AIDS patients.

The grant is the second awarded to BC by Imperial College London’s CD4 Initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle). The first grant, awarded in March, provided funding for the development of quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) materials used to verify the accuracy and validate the new test. Sybil D’Costa, PhD, staff advanced research scientist for BC’s Custom Biopharma Solutions, is the principal investigator on both projects.

BC will begin working with Imperial College London to develop the new test designed for use in extreme environments and remote settings where electricity, clean water and trained healthcare technicians may or may not be available. The goal is that the new test will involve a finger prick blood sampling methodology and will require minimal technical expertise to decipher.

Prior to commercialization, the POC assay will be tested by comparing its performance to BC’s gold standard, tetraONE CD4 cell enumeration system. Tests will be compared using blood from the same donor, and both normal and HIV positive samples will be evaluated to ensure the highest level of accuracy.

Recent reports indicate there are nearly 40 million people living with HIV worldwide with 64% of them living in the extremely resource limited settings of sub-Saharan Africa.

In contract news:

• Merge Healthcare (Milwaukee), a medical imaging software and services provider, reported several new contracts for Fusion RIS/PACS MX, a solution for clinical and business imaging workflow, released in April.

They include: Atlanta Radiology Consultants (Atlanta); Center for Medical Imaging (Germantown, Wisconsin); Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology (Long Island, New York).

Merge says its research identifies market needs for PACS and RIS technologies — especially in freestanding imaging centers and in hospitals with fewer than 200 beds. The hospitals represent nearly 70% of all U.S. acute care hospitals, while in the U.S. freestanding imaging centers have grown in number from 4,000 to 6,000 in the last five years.

• Emergency Medical Services (Greenwood Village, Colorado) reported that its EmCare business has entered into new agreements to provide radiology staffing and services for two healthcare systems.

EmCare’s radiology services operation, RadCare (Dallas) has entered into a three-year agreement to provide radiology services for Erlanger Health System (Chattanooga, Tennessee). RadCare was one of six providers being considered by Erlanger, the company noted. RadCare will provide radiologist staffing to perform about 300,000 radiology studies a year for several sites. Services are scheduled to begin July 1. Erlanger, a public, not-for-profit system of five hospitals, is a level 1 trauma health system. Founded in 1891, Erlanger Health System is affiliated with the University of Tennessee College of Medicine.

Under a separate agreement, RadCare began providing radiology staffing and services for Alameda County Medical Center (Oakland, California). RadCare’s radiologists will perform roughly 80,000 studies a year under the three-year agreement, which went into effect May 1. Alameda County Medical Center operates Highland Hospital and John George Psychiatric Pavilion, as well as facilities providing rehabilitation, long-term care and a wide range of out-patient clinic appointments.

RadCare anticipates that combined annual net revenue for the two new agreements will be about $13 million.

RadCare is a radiology department management services provider to hospitals and imaging centers.