A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Adept Technology (Livermore, California), a provider of vision-guided robotics and global robotics services, reported a medical device automation program with Insulet (Bedford, Massachusetts) for the OmniPod Insulet Management System, a technology for insulin delivery in diabetes management.

The OmniPod System integrates insulin infusion and blood glucose monitoring in a two-part system. Insulet's medical device production will use Adept Cobra SCARA robots and Adept Viper 6-Axis articulated robots under coordinated Smart SERVO control.

Kevin Schmid, vice president of manufacturing, said, "We continuously expand our OmniPod production capability in order to satisfy the tremendous demand for this product. We need Adept's advanced robotics based on their flexibility, speed and dependability for our assembly operations."

Insulet's OmniPod is being assembled in the U.S.

• Royal Philips Electronics (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) said it is working with Team of Physicians for Students (TOPS; Phoenix) to launch the Save an Athlete program, designed to educate student athletes, their families, doctors, athletic directors and coaches about preventing sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) through early cardiac testing. Save an Athlete is designed to raise awareness about SCA and advocate for sports screening physicals with testing to uncover cardiac conditions that may lead to SCA, such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).

Congenital cardiovascular conditions, such as HCM, are major causes of SCA in high school and college athletes. According to the Cleveland Clinic, HCM affects as many as 1.5 million Americans, making it the most common cause of sudden cardiac arrest in people under age 30.

• Target Discovery (Palo Alto, California) entered a collaboration with researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (Houston) to develop a new generation of cancer diagnostic assays.

The collaboration will initially focus on breast cancer, followed by other cancer areas with serious unmet diagnostic needs. Scientists at Target Discovery will use the company's patented mass defect technology, Isotope-Differentiated Binding Energy Shift Tags (IDBEST), to validate clinical protein biomarkers at the isoform level, using retrospective patient samples provided by M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Target Discovery will then integrate selected protein isoform biomarkers into its proprietary Isonostics technology to develop clinical assays designed to assist clinicians in differentiating between invasive and noninvasive forms of breast cancer.

• StarBak Communications (Waltham, Massachusetts), a provider of integrated network video solutions designed to allow organizations to create, manage, deliver and display video-based applications over IP networks, reported that it will be participating in the demonstration of a new integrated clinical communications system at the upcoming American Telemedicine Association (ATA; Washington) conference to be held May 7-10 in San Diego.

In collaboration with IBM (Armonk, New York), Polycom (Milpitas, California) and medical informatics company Sybermedica (Cambridge, UK), StarBak will demonstrate its Integrated Network Video (INV) solution.