Medical Device Industry News

Obama presses healthcare reform case on the stump in Ohio

March 15, 2010 by MedCity News

By Mary Vanac

The Strongsville, Ohio, crowd warming up for a speech today by President Barack Obama knew what it wanted. Healthcare.

So did dozens of protesters who lined Royalton Road with colorful, waving signs. Most of them wanted the president of the United States to take his ideas for health insurance reform back to Washington.

There was an edge of urgency to the the Strongsville crowd, unlike the crowd at Shaker Heights High School that had warmly welcomed the president in July 2009, when he hosted a healthcare "Town Hall" meeting there. President Obama seemed to feel a heightened sense of urgency too.

HistoRx lands $1.5 million loan from Connecticut Innovations

March 15, 2010 by MassDevice staff

HistoRx Inc., a cancer therapy diagnostics firm based in New Haven, won a $1.5 million loan from Connecticut's quasi-public life sciences initiative.

HistoRx is developing what it calls AQUA, technology designed to assess the potential effectiveness of cancer drugs and predict patients' responses to the treatments. The system uses fluorescence-based image analysis and automated microscopy to measure protein molecules. Connecticut Innovations, the quasi-public equivalent of the Mass. Life Sciences Center, is loaning the company $1.5 million to build out laboratory space and buy equipment.

Device giants tout trial results at ACC conference

March 15, 2010 by MassDevice staff

The biggest names in the medical device world are busy touting the results of several clinical trials of their cardiovascular products, with more to come from the American College of Cardiology's 59th annual scientific session.

Companies including Abbott (NYSE:ABT), Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) and Boston Scientific Corp. (NYSE:BSX) are making presentation after presentation at the Atlanta conference, hoping to drum up abuzz among the attending surgeons.

Boston Scientific's Taxus Element stent Taxus Express2