A Medical Device Daily

SurModics (Eden Prairie, Minnesota), a provider of surface modification technologies in the areas of biocompatibility, site specific drug delivery, biological cell encapsulation, and medical diagnostics, and AbbeyMoor Medical (Miltona, Minnesota),adeveloper of urological stenting devices, reported the signing of an agreement to jointly develop products intended to site-specifically deliver therapeutic agents to treat various diseases of the prostate, such as prostatitis and prostate cancer.

AbbeyMoor has developed the Spanner Prostatic Stent, which is designed to manage prostatic obstruction in men. AbbeyMoor recently completed a multicenter clinical trial and is progressing with the premarket approval (PMA) process with the FDA. The PMA was filed in March.

SurModics has licensed its polymer matrix technology to enhance the Spanner platform to incorporate drug delivery capabilities.

“We are pleased to join forces with AbbeyMoor in the development of a potentially revolutionary approach to treating diseases of the prostate,” said Bruce Barclay, president and CEO of SurModics. “This relationship opens yet another avenue for SurModics to exploit the convergence of drugs and devices, as we have done in both the cardiovascular and ophthalmology markets.””

“The markets for prostatitis and prostate cancer are large, and have significant unmet clinical needs,” said Brian Robey, vice president and general manager of SurModics' Drug Delivery business unit. “We believe AbbeyMoor's Spanner stent provides an ideal platform to site specifically deliver drugs and other therapeutic agents with the goal of providing improved patient outcomes. The potential value to physicians and their patients of site specific drug delivery in this application include improved efficacy by increasing the concentration levels of the drug to the prostate, minimizing potential toxicity resulting from systemic drug administration and improved patient compliance with their prescribed treatment.”

It has been estimated that there are more than 10 million men in the U.S. with benign prostatic hyperplasia. It is further estimated that each year, about 232,000 men in the U.S. are diagnosed with prostate cancer, and another 220,000 are diagnosed with chronic prostatitis.

In other agreements news:

• Tutogen Medical (Alachua, Florida), a maker of sterile biological implant products made from human (allograft) and animal (xenograft) tissue, said it has entered into a distribution agreement with Mentor (Santa Barbara, California), which focuses on breast implant and aesthetic product markets.

Mentor will have the exclusive North American rights for the use of Tutoplast Dermis in the dermatology and plastic surgery markets for breast reconstruction.

Tutogen will be receiving an up-front payment.

• Abaxis (Union City, California), a medical products company manufacturing point-of-care blood analysis systems, reported that the company has entered into a formal distribution agreement with Henry Schein (Melville, New York), which describes itself as the largest provider of healthcare products and services to office-based practitioners in the combined North American and European markets.

Henry Schein's Medical Group will sell and distribute the complete line of Abaxis' human reagent rotors and the Piccolo chemistry analyzer within the U.S. medical market.