A Medical Device Daily

Stryker (Kalamazoo, Michigan) said it has opened a global R&D center in Gurgaon, India, to boost its expansion in that country.

Stryker said that the facility is the first such center for it in the Asia-Pacific region, and it will have facilities for all products under innovation, Stephen MacMillan, company president/CEO told the publication Pharmabiz. "We have 20 such technology centers in Europe and the U.S., but most of them cater to specialized products. The Indian center will have research on all products," he said.

The center in India has opened with 40 scientists, and with more to be added in stages.

Stryker said its areas of focus in India will be orthopedic implants, operating room equipment, surgical navigation and communications, endoscopy and power instruments.

MacMillan told Pharmabiz that India is evolving as a large market in medical devices. The company launched operations in four metro areas there in 2001 and plans to expand sales to more than 20 markets by the end of 2007.

Quintiles dedicates Mumbai lab

In other news out of India, Quintiles Transnational (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina) last week dedicated its new central lab in Mumbai, and company CEO and Chairman Dennis Gilings congratulated Quintiles India for its 10 years of growth and leadership in clinical research.

The lab expands Quintiles' global central laboratory network and enhances its services offered thre to support global and regional clinical trials. In addition to central lab and clinical research businesses, Quintiles India offers electrocardiogram (ECG), interactive voice response (IVR) and data management services.

Gillings said. "Since establishing an office in Ahmedabad 10 years ago, we have added offices in Mumbai and Bangalore with a full complement of services, expanded our clinical research staff to 750 and have conducted more than 700 global trials across business lines. We also were involved in the training of hundreds of investigators on Good Clinical Practice guidelines and helped put India on the world map for clinical research."

The Mumbai lab will provide access to Quintiles laboratory kits, ensure

consistent, timely methods of sample processing and overseeing of data transfer for inclusion in the Quintiles Laboratory Information Management System and the protocol-specific database.

Quintiles owns a network of facilities in the U.S., Europe, South Africa, India, China and Singapore, and has a network of sub-contractor laboratories in Argentina and Brazil.

Quintiles provides services in drug development, financial partnering and commercialization.

Cardia, Century, extend accord in Japan

Cardica (Redwood City, California) and its Japanese distributor, Century Medical, have extended an agreement to distribute the PAS-Port Proximal Anastomosis System in Japan through July 2014.

"We have been extremely successful in marketing the PAS-Port system in the Japanese market, where the majority of all bypass procedures are performed on a beating heart," said Toshio Konishi, president/CEO of Century. "Currently, over 330 doctors at 220 hospitals throughout Japan have been trained on the PAS-Port system, and today, we have over 20% market share of all proximal anastomoses performed using a vein bypass graft during CABG surgery in Japan."

Cardica and Century also agreed to restructure Cardica's $3 million note to Century. Cardica will make a principal payment of $1 million toward its outstanding indebtedness to Century, the remaining $2 million to be due in June 2010, two years beyond the original maturity date.

Bernard Hausen, MD, PhD, president/CEO of Cardica, said the restructuring enables the company to apply more of its cash reserves to the commercialization and development of its automated anastomosis systems, "which we believe have significant growth potential in the years ahead."

Fonar's Damadian honored at UAE meeting

Raymond Damadian, founder and president of Fonar (Melville, New York), was a guest speaker at the annual Abu Dhabi International Surgical Conference in the United Arab Emirates early last month for his contribution to medicine and surgery for his pioneering work in MRI.

The company displayed the Upright Multi-Position MRI during the meeting at the Emirates Palace Hotel, attended by representatives from more than 20 countries.

Conference co-chair Issam Khoury, MD, chief of neurosurgery and chairman of surgery at Mafraq Hospital, said, "We are thankful to Professor Damadian for his discovery of the signal that enables the MR to make the highly detailed pictures of normal and diseased tissues and for the invention of the world's first MR scanner."

Khoury said the Upright technology "is quickly becoming the MRI of choice. Patients walk in, are scanned in the weight-bearing position, and walk out. We endorse it for its importance in diagnostic radiology."

The company also reported selecting a distributor in the Middle East to spearhead its sales efforts in that region. The distributor was not named

More reagents from China Medical

China Medical Technologies (Beijing, China), a maker of in vitro diagnostic systems and high-intensity focused ultrasound products, said it completed development of 10 new chemiluminescence immunoassay infertility diagnostic reagents, increasing its reagent kit offerings to a total of 72.

The reagents, designed to measure antibodies that affect reproduction and potentially to analyze immunological factors that cause infertility, are expected to be introduced in July.

The National Population and Family Planning Commission of China estimates more than 300 million women of child-bearing age in China in 2006, with about 10% facing infertility problems. Immunological tests analyze the causes of infertility arising from the immune system.