The Medical Device Business Journal — Medical Device News & Articles | MassDevice
Brad Perriello
You’d think after about 20 years, questions about the efficacy of stents would be settled. You’d be wrong.
Even as players large and small scramble to get the first bioabsorbable product to market, there are conflicting reports about the best way to treat heart disease — devices or drugs?
Vital signs are improving at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — at least, techniques to measure them are, according to MIT Tech Talk.
Engineers at the school, led by mechanical engineering professor Harry Asada, built a wearable blood pressure cuff that provides 24-hour monitoring.
The idea is to allow physicians to track vital signs on a continuous basis, to improve treatment of such conditions as sleep apnea, hypertension and heart disease.
And, given the accumulation of enought data, the device might eventually allow doctors to predict when heart attacks are due, Asada told the newspaper.
Covidien head honcho Richard Meelia is leaving his post on the board of Haemonetics Corp. so that he can spend more time with his company.
The Braintree-based blood management company said Meelia is leaving the board “in order to spend more professional time on Covidien’s operations.”
Meelia is leaving two years before his term was set to end in 2011. He joined the board in 2005 and was re-elected in July 2008.
NMT Medical Inc. said it will release data from the clinical trial of its StarFlex implant.
Analysis of data from the study, which aims to determine whether the device can help prevent stroke or ischemia from patent formane ovale, is due to be released during the fourth quarter of 2010. PFO is a defect in the septum separating the heart’s atrial chambers.
The StarFlex implant closes the defect, preventing venous blood from returning to the body without being oxygenated by the lungs.
The federal Food & Drug Administration is gearing up to review 25 types of medical devices made before 1976, the year the watchdog agency got its brief to review new medical technologies.
Makers of the devices will have to submit safety and effectiveness data to the FDA within 120 days, which it will use to evaluate the risk level for each device type.
If found to be “of high risk to consumers,” the devices will have to undergo “the agency’s most stringent premarket review process,” according to a press release.
A Missouri-based subsidiary of Mansfield’s Covidien, Mallinckrodt Inc., accused a pair of Italian life science firm Bracco SpA‘s American divisions of patent infringement, The Boston Globe reported.
Hazelwood, Mo.-based Mallinckrodt sued Bracco’s Lake Success, N.Y.-based E-Z-EM Inc. and Acist Medical Systems Inc. of Eden Prairie, Minn., in Delaware federal court for allegedly infringing its patent for a device used to inject chemicals into MRI patients.
By MassDevice
Salaries among top-level executives at Thermo Fisher Scientific rose across the board after the company posted a 31 percent increase to its bottom line.
The Waltham-based laboratory instruments maker said executives received an average base wage increase of about 4 percent in 2008, not including performance bonuses and stock awards.
CEO Marijn Dekkers pulled in the highest compensation, at a $1.1 million base salary and $1.8 million in incentives. He was also granted stock valued at around $15.5 million. Dekkers, 51, took the helm at Thermo Fisher in 2002.
The National Institutes of Health tapped a prominent Boston-area physician and businessman to sit on a board responsible for setting policy at the federal health research agencies.
James Thrall, radiologist-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, was one of three people named to the board on April 3.
The advisory committee to the director at the NIH is a powerful position. The 20-person board reports directly to the secretary of the federal Health and Human Services Dept., as well as the NIH director on policy matters.
Pharma is sexy. Big drugs, big money, big news. In the life sciences arena, perhaps only biotech commands a higher political and public profile.
So it isn’t surprising that the medical device industry’s groundbreaking inclusion in Massachusetts’ new code of conduct garnered relatively little attention.
But the new rules governing industry payments to physicians — the so-called “gift ban” — include provisions aimed at curbing what some call undue and improper influence by medical device manufacturers.
The U.S. Navy is furious that the federal Food & Drug Administration repeatedly spiked clinical trials of Biopure Corp.‘s Hemopure blood substitute, according to an internal Navy report obtained by The Boston Globe.
The Navy wants to examine whether Hemopure can be used on the battlefield to treat combat injuries when blood transfusions aren’t available.
Bruker Group acquired a German subsidiary of Varian Medical Systems for an undisclosed amount.
Bruker, which has operations in Billerica, closed the deal April 1 for Accel Instruments GmbH, a division of Varian that makes research instruments and proton therapy devices.
