Diagnostic Update
February 16, 2006
Agreements roundup
Johns Hopkins lab, Hologic in bone health analysis pact
A Diagnostics & Imaging Week Staff Report
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL; Laurel, Maryland) has
signed an agreement with Hologic (Bedford, Massachusetts), granting it exclusive,
worldwide rights to the lab's bone health analysis technology.
Hologic is a provider of diagnostic imaging and digital imaging systems directed towards
women's health, including bone densitometry equipment.
"This is a great example of the types of collaborations that are needed to move
government-funded technologies into the public sector,"said Heather Curran, marketing
and technology manager in the APL Office of Technology Transfer. "This work was
originally funded, in part, to help astronauts. This agreement ensures that many more
people will benefit from this technology."
The Hip Structure Analysis (HSA) technology was developed through the collaborative
efforts of Drs. Thomas Beck and Harry Charles, along with Howard Feldmesser and
Thomas Magee.
Beck, an associate professor of radiology in the Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine (Baltimore), is a "world leader" in the development of biomechanical
parameters of hip structure derived from densitometric information, according to Johns
Hopkins. His HSA method and its prediction of bone strength has been the subject of
more than30 peer-reviewed publications.
i3Archive (Berwyn, Pennsylvania) and IBM (Armonk, New York) reported their
commitment to jointly market commercial disaster recovery and business continuity
services to the medical imaging industry.
Under this new agreement, i3Archive and IBM will focus on buildingawareness around
the benefits that i3Archive's on-demand, enterprisescale, medical imaging data
management services can provide to healthcare institutions with limited financial
resources.
"Given the critical nature of disaster recovery in healthcare, i3Archive has chosen IBM
hardware, middleware and services for our reliability and scalability," said Mike Svinte,
vice president for IBM Information-Based Medicine. "Together we are providing small
and medium hospitals, clinics and others the disaster recovery tools once only available
to the larger institutions."
In November, i3Archive said that it had extended the capabilities of its GRID-based
medical imaging architecture to service the needs of business continuity and disaster
recovery for picture archiving andcommunications systems (PACS). In doing so, i3 said
it exceeded the HIPAA requirements for data recovery and provided an "unprecedented"
ability to provide "fail-over" access to a replicated, virtual instance of an existing PACS
environment that can be used during periods ofunavailability or inaccessibility.
In other agreements news, BioForce Nanosciences (Ames, Iowa) said it is
collaborating with Iowa State University (ISU; also Ames) to develop a sensitive
nanotechnology-based method for detecting food-borne pathogens.
Funding for this project was awarded last week from the universityas a part of the Grow
Iowa Values Fund program, which fosters the development of commercial applications
from research.
The primary investigator on the project is Dr. Byron Brehm-Stecher, a faculty member
in the department of food science and human nutrition at ISU, where the pathogenrelated work will be performed. The focus of his research is to provide new tools for the
rapid and label-free detection of pathogen-specific nucleic acid sequences with the
potential to benefit the food industry, the medical and environmental diagnostics
industries and the biotechnology and biodefense sectors.