A Medical Device Daily

The Advanced Wound Management division of Smith & Nephew's (S&N; Hull, UK) reported the signing of an exclusive worldwide sales, marketing and distribution agreement with Covalon Technologies (Mississauga, Ontario) for its advanced range of collagen dressings. S&N Advanced Wound Management will be the sole distributor of ColActive products globally, effectively immediately.

The agreement allows the distribution of ColActive products based on Covalon's technology and also grants access and distribution rights to a new product development portfolio in the field of advanced wound care using the same technology. This will yield further new product introductions in 2007, S&N said.

It said the agreement strengthens the S&N Advanced Woundcare product portfolio alongside its Allevyn foam and Acticoat antimicrobial technologies and offers its customers a more comprehensive solution to address their wound care needs, S&N said.

The ColActive product can be used to treat a range of wound types, including pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers. The products contain collagen and sodium alginate which when applied to the wound bed creates a moist wound environment in which fibroblasts and macrophages can easily move and function more efficiently, the company said.

S&N is a global medical technology business, specializing in orthopedic reconstruction, orthopedic trauma and clinical therapies, endoscopy and advanced wound management products.

In other agreements:

• Viking Systems (San Diego), a maker of laparoscopic vision systems for use in minimally invasive surgical procedures, has expanded its domestic distribution network with the addition of a new partner, Kraft Medical (Minneapolis). Kraft will distribute Viking's 3-D technology in areas of the Midwest, including Minnesota, North Dakota, most of Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan.

Kraft is a multi-specialty distributor in the upper Midwest of selected equipment used in the surgical environment. It offers synergistic products for a variety of minimally invasive surgical procedures.

• Adept Technology (Livermore, California), a provider of intelligent vision-guided robotics and global robotics services, reported that Integrated BioSciences (IBS; Lewisberry, Pennsylvania) has selected it as its exclusive robot supplier.

IBS has bought 16 Adept Cobra i600 Scara robots, which will be used to build an automation line for high-speed assembly of a class II device for a major international customer, according to the company.

Adept designs robotic systems, motion control and machine vision technology for global markets including automotive, consumer electronics, consumer goods, food, industrial tooling, medical devices, and pharmaceutical.

• United Devices (UD; Austin, Texas) said that Bristol-Myers Squibb (Princeton, New Jersey) has engaged it to build a high-performance computing (HPC) grid to manage the global pharmaceutical and healthcare products company's HPC clusters and desktop grid.

Bristol-Myers Squibb said it selected UD after running a feature-function test plan that demonstrated the capability of UD's solutions across its most important use cases.

Terms of the agreement, which include UD solutions and services, were not disclosed.

• Medtronic's Spinal Business (Memphis, Tennessee) said it has entered into a development agreement with Osteogenix, a privately-held orthobiologic pharmaceutical company, enabling OsteoGenix to complete preclinical work on its bone anabolic agent and advance this program through clinical trials.

Medtronic said the agreement will give it an additional source of bone growth therapies for surgeons whose patients require bone grafting options.

OsteoGenix was founded in 2005 and incubated by Shalon Ventures in Palo Alto, California, to develop the osteo-pharmacologic platform discovered and patented by Greg Mundy, MD, and his associates. Mundy is a professor of medicine, pharmacology, orthopedics, and cancer biology at Vanderbilt Center for Bone Biology (Nashville, Tennessee).