Boston-based conglomerate GE worked to make the case for its health care business to investors at a Dec. 2 event, but Wall Street seemed underwhelmed. The company’s share price remains hovering around lows not seen since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
TORONTO – Burnaby, British Columbia-based Clarius Mobile Health Inc. has launched a second-generation series of wireless ultrasound scanners aimed at expanding its foothold in the North American and European imaging markets. More portable and powerful than its predecessors – the Clarius C3 and L7 launched in 2016 – the L15 hand-held ultrasound scanner series also may find markets in cardiac and sports medicine, as well as anesthesiology.
Hafnium nanoparticles that home onto microfractures in bone make the tiny cracks visible in spectral or color computed tomography (CT) imaging. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Maryland created the nanotechnology to work in conjunction with spectral molecular imaging developed by New Zealand-based MARS Bioimaging Ltd. (MBI). The research appeared in Advanced Functional Materials.
Rochester, N.Y.-based Carestream Health Inc. has won the FDA’s nod for its Dual-Energy imaging technology and Focus 35C detector with Image Suite software. The company plans a global launch of the Focus 35C by the end of the year, with U.S. rollout of Dual-Energy early next year.
There are a pair of approved CAR T drugs, Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel) from Gilead Sciences Inc. and Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) from Novartis AG, that have been available since 2017 for a few hematological cancers including some lymphomas and leukemias. But little is known about how these engineered chimeric antigen receptor T cells that both target CD19, an antigen prevalent in the cells of many B-cell malignancies, move through the body and proliferate after they are first removed, altered, expanded in number and, finally, returned to a patient's body.
The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has decided against a series of rate cuts for PET imaging in the Medicare physician fee schedule for 2020, a move lauded by physicians who were facing a rate cut of as much as 80% for nuclear medicine and molecular imaging procedures.
Navidea Biopharmaceuticals Inc. disclosed positive results from the first interim analysis of its ongoing NAV3-31 phase IIb study. Analysis shows the data support Navidea's hypothesis that Tc 99m tilmanocept imaging can provide robust, quantitative imaging in healthy controls and in patients with active rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines typically require a dedicated shielded room, as well as an additional room with electronics for analytics. That makes MRI, with a typical costly system that requires whole body immersion and elaborate facilities, not particularly feasible for many health care settings.
PARIS – Incepto Medical SAS, of Paris, raised $6.2 million from three French venture capital funds – Axa Venture Partners, Bpifrance through its Patient Autonome Fund, and Cap Decisif – to develop its artificial intelligence (AI) medical imaging platform. "This funding round is a first step toward accelerating [the] rollout of our [AI] medical imaging solutions on a grand scale throughout France," Incepto CEO Antoine Jomier told BioWorld MedTech.
The U.S. FDA has posted a draft guidance that will overwrite a 2014 draft guidance dealing with MRI compatibility for medical devices, but at least one observer is concerned that the agency posted draft as standards-setting organizations are rewriting their own related device performance standards, a fact that could draw out the time to completion of the draft.