A Medical Device Daily

Demographic changes, a boom in cardiac care and the increasing prominence of minimally invasive surgeries have triggered the need for multi-purpose, cost-efficient product offerings in the European market for catheters and guidewires for angioplasty and angiography.

Global consulting firm Frost & Sullivan (F&S; London) said in a new report, “The European Market for Catheters and Guidewires for Angioplasty and Angiography,” that innovative and cost-effective products will be “critical” to injecting new momentum into this relatively mature market.

F&S estimates that the European market for such products will total $374 million as of year-end.

“The market in Europe is being driven by changes in demographics, the rising importance of cardiac care and the expansion of minimally invasive surgeries,” said notes Research Analyst Sowmya Rajagopalan. “The ability to provide painless and effective treatment together with multi-purpose product features will be key to improving market penetration and revenues.”

The dominance of a few major companies in the space poses a challenge to smaller competitors. “Advances in alternative technologies and financially constrained hospitals favoring bulk purchases from companies with a broad product range are creating further difficulties for many market participants, F&S said.

It said that despite the development of many novel alternative technologies, catheter angioplasty and angiography continue to retain a “strong market hold” due to their simple and effective treatment methods. “The emergence of new products such as catheters attached with guidewires and multi-purpose angiography catheters also bodes well for market growth,” Rajagopalan said.

Such improvements will be critical to combat the threat posed by multi-purpose products based on alternative new technologies, according to Frost & Sullivan.

Rajagopalan cited the need for continued R&D to help produce novel, cost-efficient, superior and multi-purpose products, saying that need is being further highlighted by “ongoing healthcare reforms that have resulted in severe pricing pressures.”

She said the trend toward price reduction “is minimizing company bottom lines,” adding that “by aligning with each other, market participants can mutually benefit by increasing the penetration of not just their own products but those offered by their partners as well.”

Rajagopalan said industry participants should focus on product bundling to increase penetration levels. “At the same time, development of advanced products that are simple to use and offer efficient and painless treatments will require enhanced investments.”

UK distributor named by U.S. software maker

Eceptionist (Houston) has named Capex Health (Barnsley, UK), as its UK distribution partner.

“The UK is an important market for us and we already have several customers running our software in a live environment. It is key to our development and the care of our UK customers to have a good UK partner to sell, deliver and support our product,” said Deborah Jones, head of media relations for Eceptionist. “We believe the UK market represents an excellent opportunity for us both.”

“Healthcare budgets and the cost of care are serious issues in the UK,” said Charles Lilley, CEO of Capex Group. “We believe that fundamental to a radical and sustained reduction in treatment cost — and high-quality patient care — is care pathway redesign.”

He added that Eceptionist “is ideal, both to support and enhance the status quo and to encompass radical process redesign.”

Eceptionist is a provider of software solutions for the healthcare industry, focused on improving the efficiency and reducing the costs of healthcare organizations through the development of the Eceptionist platform.

Jones said organizations can use the Eceptionist platform to better manage healthcare as it is delivered across departments, sites, communities and countries. “Eceptionist supports scheduling, telemedicine, disease and case management, care pathways, multi-disciplinary team meetings, protocols and reporting for facilities and corporations around the world.”

Some of Eceptionist’s UK-based customers include the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS trusts, the Wirral Health Informatics Trust and the Medway NHS Trust.

Capex Health IT is part of Capex Group , which focuses exclusively on the health sector. The group consists of two companies one selling health IT products and services and one, Capex Health Services, providing health services to support primary care, including a range diagnostic, screening, testing and remote care services.

Peptidomics/Digilab IDs biomarker candidates

Digilab (Canton, Massachusetts) said it has reached an important milestone in its Peptidomics collaboration with Abbott Molecular . In the project’s first phase, Digilab has identified candidate biomarkers for lung cancer using its Differential Peptide Display (DPD) technology platform.

Abbott has exercised its right to evaluate option candidate markers for further use and has an option to acquire an exclusive royalty-bearing license from Digilab to such candidate markers.

David Giddings, president and CEO of Digilab, and Dr. Wolfram Rodatz, managing director of Digilab BioVisioN (Hannover, Germany), said in a company statement: “The project with Abbott now enters a promising new phase for Digilab. Our Peptidomics approach to biomarker discovery has once again shown that it is able to provide molecular identification of peptide candidate markers very efficiently and reliably.”

Digilab, which has been a global leader in molecular spectroscopy systems for almost 40 years, develops products and services for the life sciences research and in vitro diagnostics markets.

In the fall of 2004, Digilab sold its FTIR molecular spectroscopy assets to Varian (Palo Alto, California). Since then, the company has remained focused on sample prep, bioinformatics and spectroscopy detection/analysis devices that can be integrated into solutions for research and diagnostics applications.

Digilab acquired BioVisioN in February. Digilab is globally commercializing Digilab BioVisioN GmbH’s Peptidomics products and services and generating intellectual property in this space. It works with companies from the pharmaceutical and diagnostics sectors; analytical instrumentation hardware, software and consumables suppliers; and academic institutions and government agencies.