A Medical Device Daily

Kensey Nash (Exton, Pennsylvania) said it has executed a new Angio-Seal vascular closure device component supply contract with St. Jude Medical (St. Paul, Minnesota).

The contract, which takes effect June 30 and will expire in December 2010, provides for Kensey Nash to exclusively supply 100% of St. Jude Medical’s requirements for the collagen component of all current and future versions of the Angio-Seal device, as well as a portion of St. Jude’s bioresorbable polymer anchor requirements over the term of the agreement.

The new contract replaces an existing agreement scheduled to expire in November.

Kensey Nash will commercialize new proprietary collagen technologies through incorporation into the Angio-Seal device. The contract also provides St. Jude Medical with access to Kensey Nash’s new closed-herd collagen sources.

Angio-Seal is licensed to St. Jude Medical, giving St. Jude the worldwide development, manufacturing and sales and marketing rights to the device.

The Epilepsy Project (Reston, Virginia) and the Epilepsy Foundation (Landover, Maryland), non-profit organizations dedicated to advancing innovative new therapies for people afflicted with epilepsy, reported three recipients under their New Therapy Grants Program biannual review.

These grants are providing a record $425,000 to advance translational research projects in epilepsy. Grant recipients were chosen on the basis of demonstrating a clear translational pathway to bring new therapies from the laboratory to patients with epilepsy.

The three recipients are pioneering “radical” new treatments for managing epileptic seizures, the organizations said.

Bi-Botti Celestin Youan, PharmD, PhD, of the School of Pharmacy at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (Lubbock, Texas), and Karin Borges, PhD, were awarded a grant to explore the efficacy of spray-dried biocompatible microparticles of phenytoin, when injected into the brain, result in optimal therapeutic anticonvulsant concentrations and seizure control.

Frances Jensen, MD, associate professor of neurology at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School (both Boston), and Michael Fetell, MD, vice president-oncology and CNS at IVAX Research (Miami), were awarded a collaborative grant using an animal model to assess the anticonvulsant and anti-epileptogenic efficacy of talampanel and its effect in modulating the AMPA-receptor (AMPAR) responses in neonatal seizures and brain injury.

Leon Iasemidis, PhD, associate professor of bioengineering, Harrington Department of Bioengineering; Kostas Tsakalis, PhD, professor of electrical engineering; and David Treiman, MD, Newsome Chair in Epileptology, vice-chair of the department of neurology, director of the Epilepsy Center at Barrow Neurological Institute and research professor of bioengineering, all of Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona), were awarded a grant, partially funded through the support of the Ali Paris Fund for Landau-Kleffner Syndrome Research & Education, to explore and test a closed-loop electrical stimulation method on an animal model of chronic epilepsy using seizure prediction and intervention algorithms.

In other grants/contracts news:

• Baylor College of Medicine (BCM; Houston) reported that it has joined forces with the Intercultural Cancer Council (ICC; also Houston) and Genentech (South San Francisco, California) to improve the participation of minorities and underserved patients in clinical research trials.

The alliance of academic, private and non-profit organizations is designed to address two critical components – policy and intervention research – in the recruitment and retention of patients in oncology and asthma clinical trials. Genentech is providing $5.5 million over four years to support the program.

“Without adequate representation of ethnic and racial minorities and other underserved populations, researchers are hindered in their assessment and generalization of clinical trial results,” said Dr. Armin Weinberg, professor of medicine and family and community medicine at BCM, as well as director of the college’s Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Research Center. “The goal of this project is to get information that will help us better serve these groups.”

The initiative will be conducted in conjunction with the ICC, co-founded by Weinberg. The ICC is a multicultural group that addresses health disparities.

• InforMedix Holdings (Rockville, Maryland) and invivodata (Pittsburgh) reported a strategic partnership for the marketing, sale, distribution and implementation support of InforMedix’s Med-eMonitor System to invivodata’s global base of pharmaceutical and biotech company clients.

The collaboration combines a solution for managing patient drug safety and dose-response data in clinical trials with a leading provider of electronic Patient Reported Outcomes (ePRO) solutions to the global clinical trials market. Trial sponsors will benefit from having a choice of appropriate tools to collect critical data directly from patients.

According to the terms of the agreement, invivodata will deliver InforMedix’s Med-eMonitor System as an integral part of its product line worldwide. invivodata’s current ePRO solutions include DiaryPRO, a hand-held electronic diary, and SitePRO, a site-based data collection tool for capturing PRO data.

• Cedara Software (Toronto), a Merge Healthcare (Milwaukee) company and an independent developer of medical software technologies for the global healthcare market, reported an exclusive relationship with Molecular Therapeutics (Ann Arbor, Michigan), in which Cedara will market and sell products based on what the companies termed “new groundbreaking techniques in cancer assessment.” Using an imaging process known as functional diffusion mapping, this technology will be integrated into software solutions for early detection of treatment response in cancer care.