A Medical Device Daily

Isilon Systems (Seattle), a provider of intelligent clustered storage systems, reported that the Louis Warschaw Prostate Cancer Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s (Los Angeles) Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute has selected its Isilon IQ system to store clinical research data. The institute said it will create a “centralized, highly reliable, manageable and highly scalable storage architecture that seamlessly supports [our] leading-edge cancer research initiatives.”

The new data system features blood and gene analysis, stored on an “intelligent clustered” system, enabling Cedars-Sinai’s Prostate Cancer Center researchers to correlate clinical observations with data from endeavors such as the Human Genome Project for targeted therapies.

The center uses advanced mass spectroscopy to obtain fingerprints of all proteins in blood, gathering more than 60 gigabytes of data from a single drop of a patient’s blood. The patient record, of which the protein data comprises only one field, is stored on Isilon IQ clustered storage along with relevant information from other research projects.

Isilon said that Isilon IQ is designed for digital content and large data-intensive markets, such as digital imaging, life sciences, oil and gas and the federal government.

In other grants/contracts news:

• Natus Medical (San Carlos, California) reported receiving a three-year, dual-source supplier agreement for infant hearing screening products from Novation (Irving, Texas), the supply company of VHA and the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC). Natus will make its newborn hearing screening products available to about 2,300 VHA and UHC member organizations.

Jim Hawkins, president and CEO of Natus, said the contract award is for the Echo-Screen Hearing Screener and Algo Newborn Hearing Screener lines. Natus manufactures products for the detection, treatment, monitoring and tracking of common disorders in newborns and children. Its brand-name products, including Algo, Neometrics, Echo-Screen and neoBLUE, are sold through distributors in more than 50 countries.

• Ramp (New York) reported signing an agreement with Halco Life Safety Systems (Houston) to distribute CarePoint and CareGiver to Halco’s hospital, long-term care and physician practice clients in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

CareGiver enables long-term care facility staff to place orders for supplies, drugs and treatments from a wireless handheld PDA or desktop Internet web browser. CarePoint enables point-of-care electronic prescribing, lab orders and results, Internet-based communication, data integration and transaction processing over a handheld device or browser. Ramp markets the CareGiver and CarePoint technologies through its HealthRamp subsidiary.

Halco offers consulting and solutions in electronic process improvements and serves the healthcare, institutional, safety and security markets.