A Medical Device Daily
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.
In other agreements news:
• Patient Care Technology Systems (PCTS; Mission Viejo, California) and Premise Development (Hartford, Connecticut) reported a marketing alliance to promote the integration of their high-acuity information systems and bed management solutions. The agreement encompasses the coordination of marketing and sales resources to provide integrated patient flow solutions to acute care hospitals. Both companies are exhibiting their solutions at the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE; Washington) conference in Orlando that began Wednesday and continues through tomorrow.
• Rosetta Biosoftware (Seattle) and Sage-N Research (San Jose, California) have entered a collaboration to establish interoperability between Rosetta Biosoftware's Elucidator system for protein expression analysis and biomarker discovery and Sage-N Research's Sorcerer proteomic integrated data appliance to offer customers an advanced solution for protein expression research and protein identification.
The Rosetta Elucidator system is designed to be a scalable solution for managing and analyzing large volumes of proteomics data. It includes raw data management, the PeakTeller processing module to identify differentially-expressed proteins, and analysis at the peptide and protein level, enabling researchers to generate a list of candidate biomarkers from mass spectrometry data.
• Target Discovery (Palo Alto, California) entered a collaboration with researchers at theUniversity 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 non-invasive forms of breast cancer.