A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Ingen Technologies (Calimesa, California) said negotiations for the acquisition of InfraredMed – which have been under way for several months – are moving forward. Scott Sand, chairman and CEO, said he planned to meet with Victor Yannacone of InfraredMed in the near future "in order to structure the acquisition and move forward."

Yannacone described InfraredMed as "an entrepreneurial technology team with intellects and intellectual property and a ready-for-market, non-invasive diagnostic system for early detection of breast cancer." The company is a Delaware-registered corporation that operates under the name of Infrared Mammography Co.

"At this stage," Yannacone said, "we are a self-funded company developing the commercial prototype of an infrared mammography system based on software implementation of the potential inherent in high-resolution dynamic digital infrared imaging technology."

He said the company's intellectual property protection involves two patent applications pending in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Japan, China and Taiwan, with the first patents having been issued by China and Taiwan on the first application of the technology.

Ingen's flagship product is OxyAlert, a second-generation design of the company's BAFI product line. Both of the products are low-oxygen safety warning devices used on remote oxygen cylinders for patients, commercial aircraft, military transport, and fire and safety equipment. The Oxy-Alert technology encompasses the use of digital sensing and radio frequency transfer so that caregivers can access a hand-held remote to monitor the actual oxygen level of any oxygen cylinder at a reasonable distance, the company said.

Its newest product, OxyView, is a pneumatic gauge that provides visual safety warning of oxygen flow to hospitalized patients. The lightweight gauge is attached to the oxygen tubing just below the neck and informs the nursing staff of oxygen flow rate near the patient.

The company's Secure Balance product is a private-label product that includes a vestibular function testing system and balance therapy system. The Secure Balance program provides equipment, education and training about balance and fall prevention to physicians and other clinicians worldwide.

Sand said Ingen anticipates entering the neutraceutical and pharmaceutical markets over the next two years through its Pure Produce program, which uses hydroponics technology to grow various plants without the use of soil, fertilizer and water consumption.

Dionex (Sunnyvale, California) reported the acquisition of the Swift monolithic liquid chromatography media products, intellectual property, technology and other related assets from Teledyne Isco (Lincoln, Nebraska), a subsidiary of Teledyne Technologies (Los Angeles), in an all-cash transaction.

The company said this deal expands and strengthens Dionex's polymer bead-based separation media technology platform for ion chromatography and HPLC and enables it to enter new liquid chromatography applications in nano-, capillary-, analytical- and preparative-flow formats.

"Monolithic separation media have received increasing interest from customers in our key markets, as this novel technology allows for higher resolution and faster separation at much lower backpressures," said Lukas Braunschweiler, president and CEO of Dionex.

"The acquisition of the Swift monolithic media technology enables our company to address new applications in small- and bio-molecule ion chromatography and HPLC separations, to answer the needs of our customers to have faster separations and to continue to lead the trend towards smaller formats, system integration and miniaturization," he said.

Dionex is a maker of chromatography systems for chemical analysis. Its systems are used in environmental analysis and by the life sciences, food and beverage, chemicals, petrochemicals, power generation and electronics industries in a variety of applications.