Diagnostics & Imaging Week s

Peakadilly (Ghent, Belgium), a company focused on predictive protein biomarkers, pulled in EUR 8.5 million ($10.6 million) in a final closing of its Series A round, bringing the total amount raised to $18.4 million.

"That's a pretty significant Series A financing for Europe, I think, and a good demonstration of the confidence investors have in what we're doing and the capability of the technology," said CEO Nick McCooke. "In fact, we were oversubscribed."

Investors included GIMV (Antwerp, Belgium); Life Science Partners (Amsterdam, the Netherlands); KBC Private Equity (Brussels, Belgium); and Baekeland Fonds II, the venture capital fund of the Ghent University Association.

The first Series A closing occurred in March, when Life Science Partners and Johnson & Johnson Development, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, New Jersey), invested EUR 6 million ($7.7 million).

Peakadilly was founded in late 2004 by the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology, a research institution that provides bio-incubator space to biotech companies. It has co-founded other start-up companies such as Devgen and Ablynx (both Ghent). The technology came out of research done at Ghent University (Zwijnaarde).

Peakadilly intends to use the proceeds to increase the capacity of its protein biomarker discovery operations, which is based on its MASStermind technology.

"The technology is discovering biomarkers in blood and other tissues," McCooke told Diagnostic & Imaging Week's sister publication, BioWorld Today, "and we will be using that in our own projects in discovering biomarkers that will be used in diagnostic and pharmacodiagnostic products."

With the technology, the analysis of one blood sample allows researchers to assess close to 3,000 different proteins and their processed isoforms. Peakadilly is able to deliver heat-maps comparable to microarray datasets, which include the position of the biomarker in the gene product.

The expansion of the technology will help Peakadilly develop more relationships with pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, the company said. The biomarker discovery engine is known as COFRADIC, which stands for "combined fractional diagonal chromatography."

McCooke said Peakadilly's technology represents a significant advance over other approaches. "The gold standard in proteomics is still the 2-D gel, but we've implemented a much higher throughput, much more sensitive, much higher dynamic range technology," he said.

In connection with the financing, Peakadilly named Jim Van heusden, senior investment manager at GIMV, to its board.

McCooke said he was not certain how far the Series A funds would carry Peakadilly. "As is the case with a company that has a revenue-generating component to the model, it's going to be a little dependent on the scale of the revenues," he said.

Peakadilly has a vision that biomarkers, which it calls "peaks," will become a commodity just like the consumer brands advertised at places like Piccadilly Circus in London. The company hopes to create diagnostics that will revolutionize the development of cancer and inflammatory disease treatments, and that will enable the development of personalized medicines. It currently has 28 employees.

NHS sets new diagnostic waiting times

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) already has improved access to diagnostic procedures such as tests and scans, but further improvements will help deliver ambitious new waiting time targets, said Health Minister Caroline Flint.

Responding to a review of diagnostic services in NHS acute-care hospitals published by the Healthcare Commission, Flint said improving diagnostics "continues to be a key priority. Since 1997 an extra 200 million has been invested in scanning equipment in the NHS, an extra 1,600 radiographers have been recruited, and the number of students entering radiography training has more than doubled."

She added that the independent sector also is providing more than 1.5 million additional diagnostic procedures per year for NHS patients over the next five years.

"To help the NHS identify where further improvements need to be made, we have for the first time started publishing monthly waiting times for diagnostic procedures across every Trust," Flint said. "This transparency is unprecedented in the history of the NHS and is a vital step in delivering the new 18-week maximum wait from GP to treatment by the end of 2008."

She said the Department of Health is confident the NHS will deliver this new target. "The service has already eradicated the long waits that were all too common in the past – the average outpatient wait is four weeks, while the average inpatient wait is around seven weeks. The challenge now is to build on this success and give patients even more certainty about their treatment."

To further speed up access to diagnostic tests, the Department of Health also announced that the choice of scan program would be extended. Beginning next April, patients who do not have an appointment within 13 weeks will be offered an appointment at an alternate hospital or clinic.

Levels of consciousness guidelines issued

Aspect Medical Systems (Newton, Massachusetts) said that the Australian and New Zealand College of Anesthetists (ANZCA) and the Madrid Centro Society for Anesthesia (MCSA) have each published recommendations for monitoring level of consciousness during anesthesia.

The recommendations were written to guide ANZCA and MCSA members in recognizing the problem of unintended awareness and adopt a consensus on how to reduce the incidence of inadvertent surgical wake-ups. Aspect noted that unintended awareness occurs when patients do not receive enough anesthesia, leaving them at risk for becoming aware of what is happening and remembering this experience after the surgery is over.

"The ANZCA and MCSA recommendations are consistent with the clinical guidance provided by other medical societies in the U.S. and Europe and reflect an increasing global recognition of the need to address awareness as a patient safety concern," said Nassib Chamoun, president/CEO of Aspect. "We believe this is an important step toward improving patient safety and reducing the risk of awareness."

He said that Aspect's Bispectral Index (BIS) "is the only brain monitoring technology or clinical intervention that has been shown in large scale, prospective clinical research to reduce the incidence of awareness."

Using a sensor placed on the patient's forehead, BIS monitoring translates information from the electroencephalogram into a single number that represents each patient's level of consciousness. This number – the BIS value – ranges from 100 (indicating an awake patient) to zero (indicating the absence of brain activity). Using the BIS value allows clinicians to make better-informed decisions to achieve optimal anesthesia, the company said.

The ANZCA has said that consciousness monitors should be used in all high-risk anesthetics and that equipment to monitor the anesthetic effect on the brain should be available for use on patients at high risk of awareness during general anesthesia.

For its part, the MCSA said that it promotes the use of depth-of-consciousness monitors and supports education on how to best use the monitors to reduce the incidence of intraoperative awareness. The society defines preventative measures that apply to the clinician, the equipment, the medical staff, and the patient, identifying a list of high-risk patient characteristics.

The recommendations of the two groups follow similar statements made by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, American Association of Nurse Anesthetists and the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland About BIS Monitoring

To date, Aspect's BIS technology has been the subject of some 2,370 published articles and abstracts.

BioMag approved for Mexican trials

BioMag (Orangevale, California) said it has been approved by the Mexican Health Ministry to conduct clinical trials for the company's High Throughput Screening-Magnetic Testing Platform (HTS-MTP).

The company has partnered with the largest social institute in Latin America, Instituto Mexican del Seguro Social (IMSS), to conduct clinical trials in Mexico.

The company said it believes that clinical trials will confirm that its system will provide confirmatory and viral load diagnostics at the same cost of screening assays. It added that the HTS-MTP will detect any virus or bacteria and count the viral load in a matter of minutes, and has the capabilities of screening several hundred percent more assays per hour at a fraction of the cost of current technologies.