A Medical Device Daily
EpiCept (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey) reported that it has regained full worldwide development and commercialization rights to its product candidate LidoPAIN SP, for post-surgical incisional pain, from Adolor (Exton, Pennsylvania).
Under a license agreement signed in 2003, EpiCept granted Adolor the exclusive right to commercialize a sterile topical patch containing an analgesic alone or in combination, including LidoPAIN SP, throughout North America. Adolor was to conduct clinical trials and complete the approval process in North America.
Adolor reported in February that it had completed a 22-patient pharmacokinetic trial of LidoPAIN SP.
Adolor said it expects to transition the program to EpiCept by the end of the year.
“We believe it is important to evaluate development programs at definitive milestones and determine whether it is a productive use of resources to continue development,” said David Madden, interim president/CEO of Adolor. “In this case, we have decided that the company’s resources are better allocated to our other clinical and discovery research efforts.”
“We remain very optimistic about the product candidate’s clinical and commercial potential,” said Jack Talley, president/CEO of EpiCept. “We are committed to identifying the optimal development strategy for LidoPAIN SP, both in the U.S. and in Europe. As part of this effort, we are continuing our ongoing analysis of the Phase III clinical trial results for LidoPAIN SP to determine what changes in trial design could be made to improve the likelihood of a positive result in a subsequent trial.” He said that a Phase III trial could be launched in the U.S. and Europe in the first half of 2007.
EpiCept has a portfolio of product candidates with several pain therapies in late-stage clinical trials. The company’s R&D team in San Diego is pursuing a drug discovery program focused on novel approaches to apoptosis.
Adolor develops prescription pain management products.
In other agreements news:
• Emageon (Birmingham, Alabama) and Vital Images (Minneapolis) have signed an agreement in which Emageon will resell Vital Images’ Vitrea software as an integrated component within Emageon’s Enterprise Visual Medical System (EVMS). Emageon said the partnership enables it to market Vital Images’ Vitrea software to about 600 hospitals nationwide.
Vital Images’ visualization and analysis tools complement Emageon’s enterprise visualization and workflow solution. Vital Images will provide the ability to integrate its stand-alone software into Emageon’s EVMS, providing clinicians access to clinical content management capabilities through the same user interface.
Vitrea software creates 2-D, 3-D and 4-D images of human anatomy from computed tomography and MRI image data. Vitrea uses an intuitive clinical workflow and automation to improve speed to clinical decisions and workflow simplicity over other visualization techniques.
Accessing Vitrea through Emageon’s solution will allow hospitals to acquire, distribute, manipulate and manage additional advanced visualization and diagnostic reports across the healthcare enterprise, the companies said. With the integration, volumes of image data can be sent directly to the Emageon EVMS, where physicians can access Vitrea’s advanced visualization and analysis tools and review the image data seamlessly without interrupting the workflow.
• Radlink (Redondo Beach, California) has signed an agreement with Standish X-Ray (Dover, New Jersey) to serve as master distributor of Standish’s CR Pro machine to healthcare organizations in New Jersey.
Standish, a provider of imaging equipment and services, will be responsible for New Jersey sales of Radlink’s CR Pro machine. The system utilizes Radlink’s sealed fiber-optic laser technology to deliver high-resolution, diagnostic-quality digital X-ray images. Radlink is a global radiography company providing medical film-to-digital image conversion, storage and delivery services to healthcare providers.
• Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina) reported that new agreements for transfusion donor services, equipment and supplies have been awarded to Pall (East Hills, New York) and Sarstedt (Newton, North Carolina).
The 36-month agreements that went into effect Oct. 1 are available to acute-care and continuum-of-care members of Premier.
Purchasing Partners is the largest unit of Premier, a healthcare alliance owned by more than 200 of the nation’s not-for-profit hospitals and healthcare systems.