A Medical Device Daily

Clearant (Los Angeles), developer of the Clearant Process, reported that Community Tissue Services (CTS; Dayton, Ohio), a distributor accounting for about 10% of the $1 billion U.S. tissue market, has signed an agreement to adopt the Clearant Process. CTS, with 10 locations throughout the country in addition to its headquarters in Dayton, is one of the larger non-profit tissue banks in the U.S., the company said.

Investment firm Piper Jaffray has estimated the 2005 U.S. tissue market to be approximately $1 billion and Emerging Growth Equities has forecasted a 15% to 20% annual growth rate for the market.

The new agreement allows CTS to use the Clearant Sterilization Service for a variety of human-sourced soft-tissue and bone allograft implants. CTS will initially begin to convert its soft-tissue operations to the Clearant Process and then migrate the technology to its hard-tissue processing.

CTS can outsource the irradiation of hard- and soft-tissue allografts to Clearant. Clearant will then process the allografts using their proprietary technology.

The Clearant Process is designed to substantially reduce all types of pathogens in biological products while maintaining a high degree of the underlying protein.

Biophan Technologies (West Henrietta, New York), a developer of “next-generation“ biomedical technology, said that it has joined as a senior member of the Biomimetic Micro-Electronic Systems Engineering Research Center at the University of Southern California (USC/BMES ERC; Los Angeles), in a collaboration to revolutionize biomedical devices, including through development and integration of Biophan's proprietary innovations.

The partnership gives Biophan access to the USC/BMES ERC's “world-class“ research facilities, the company said. Biophan will contribute its expertise in advanced medical device enhancement technologies to collaborate with the USC center. Research will focus on the development of new medical device solutions, including the application of Biophan's technologies to make medical devices MRI-safe and/or image compatible. Many implantable medical devices are currently contraindicated for use with MRI.

Through an initial $17 million grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF; Arlington, Virginia), the USC/BMES ERC has been established to advance the education, research, and commercialization of biomedical devices that can dramatically improve the quality of life for patients with debilitating diseases.

Expanding into a new market segment, Bluegate (Houston) said it has signed an outsourced healthcare IT services agreement with Northwest Oral and Maxillo-facial Surgery (NWOMS; Woodlands, Texas). Bluegate is a provider of outsourced healthcare IT solutions, professional technology consulting services and the Bluegate Medical Grade Network.

In January Bluegate began to provide all IT outsourcing for NWOMS's six practices throughout Texas, including full enterprise management for servers, storage equipment, backup equipment, desktops, notebooks, printers, switches, routers and firewalls; anti-virus services management and removal of spyware, viruses and harmful software; quarterly network health check-ups; custom programming; IT policy and procedure planning; mandating and enforcing IT standards; and proactive enterprise monitoring services managed 24/7.

These services are designed for healthcare organizations that want to adhere to best IT practices of HIPAA, technology and business relating to operating system patches, locking down of desktops, roaming profiles and auditing. In addition, Bluegate will be assisting NWOMS in deploying Kodak's PenCharts electronic medical record (EMR) system in all of its practices.

NWOMS is a comprehensive, practice that uses extensive imaging applications and is a national reference site for the Kodak PracticeWorks system.