A Medical Device Daily

Research presented at this week’s British Cardiovascular Society annual conference shows that many heart attack patients are more likely to survive if paramedics take them directly to specialist heart attack centers for emergency primary angioplasty, rather than local accident and emergency departments for traditional clot-busting treatment.

Miles Dalby, MD, a consultant cardiologist at Harefield Hospital (London), and his colleagues compared the outcome of 180 patients who received direct primary angioplasty at Harefield in Middlesex to the outcome of 181 patients who received the thrombolysis treatment at district general hospitals in the preceding two years.

The results showed that direct primary angioplasty with rapid arrival-to-treatment times had a “significantly higher” survival rate than thrombolysis.

Dalby said patients who were taken directly to Harefield Hospital by paramedics for primary angioplasty had a very low 30-day mortality rate of less than 3%. “This shows a very large and significant mortality benefit when compared to patients who received thrombolysis treatment,” he said. That patient group had a mortality rate of 9%.

The research highlighted the need for rapid treatment, showing that while a less-than-3%, 30-day mortality rate for primary angioplasty was achieved when patients were taken directly to Harefield by ambulance, those who went to district general hospitals first and later were transferred to Harefield for primary angioplasty had a much higher mortality rate.

Dalby said that prompt treatment is the essence of an effective primary angioplasty service and requires an exceptionally high level of commitment from the whole team: “During a heart attack, blood flow to the heart muscle is blocked, which damages it,” he said. “The sooner the patient receives treatment enabling the blood flow to return to the coronary arteries, the less damage occurs. This gives better long-term results — time is muscle.”

Harefield Hospital said that for the past three years it has offered northwest London residents fast access to specialist emergency care at a 24-hour “Heart Attack Center.”

London Ambulance Service paramedics have undergone specialist training to identify patients whose lives could be saved by being transferred directly to Harefield. The ambulances are met by a specialist cardiology team and the patient is taken directly to the cath labs, where primary angioplasty is carried out immediately.

Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust is a center of excellence in the research, diagnosis and treatment of heart and lung disease.

Linde Gas UK acquisition completed

Air Liquide (Paris) reported completing its acquisition of Linde Gas UK last week, the transaction having an enterprise value of 1105 million.

Air Liquide said the acquisition will have an “immediate and positive impact” on its results and allow it to almost double the size of its UK operation.

The new business is “very complementary” with Air Liquide activities, the company said, adding that the acquisition of additional production units will enable Air Liquide to provide a wider range of products and services to key industry sectors and significantly enhance its capabilities.

“It also gives an exciting opportunity to access the UK hospital and homecare markets, an area where Air Liquide has proven its ability to provide innovative and customer oriented solutions elsewhere in the world,” the company said.

Klaus Schmieder, senior executive vice-president of the Air Liquide Group, said, “Air Liquide will integrate the existing UK operations in an enlarged business, to grow and strengthen its position as a key player in the UK industrial and medical gases markets. It will also enable us to increase our ambitions in this market through more rapid deployment of our group’s overall resources and expertise.”

Air Liquid, which has nearly 37,000 employees in 72 countries, and is a world leader in both industrial and medical gases and related services, has been present in the UK since 2004, following the acquisition of local Messer operations.

With about 280 employees, Linde Gas UK has total revenues of some 160 million derived from a diversified industrial, medical and homecare customer base throughout the country. About 30% of its activities are in the medical gases and homecare services markets.

EU awards 12.9M to COBRED effort

The COBRED consortium reported that the EU Commission has awarded a 12.9 million ($3.9 million) grant as part of the 6th Framework Program to the COBRED project coordinated by BioSystems International (Evry, France).

The COBRED project is focused on discovering colon cancer and breast cancer biomarkers/diagnostics for patient follow-up — also known as monitoring markers – by exploiting the capacity of three high-throughput technologies in an integrated systems biology approach.

In addition to BioSystems International, the consortium comprises two other biotech firms, Ipsogen (Marseille, France) and Biocrates (Innsbruck, Austria); two large comprehensive cancer centers, Institut Curie (Paris) and Institut Gustave Roussy (Villejuif, France); and three academic partners, University of Debrecen (Debrecen, Hungary; University of Innsbruck (Innsbruck, Austria) and University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia).

The consultancy firm ARTTIC (Paris) will support the consortium for project management.

After three years, COBRED is to deliver a set of biomarker/diagnostic candidates verified in pre-clinical studies, ready for large-scale clinical validation and further development for commercialization by the respective firms.

Although within the project scope, COBRED is focused on biomarkers for follow-up diagnostics, the diagnostic candidates may have the potential to aid early cancer detection via population screening. And data gathered in the study may point to yet poorly understood cancer mechanisms.