The Medical Device Business Journal — Medical Device News & Articles | MassDevice
Millipore Corp. donated $225,000 in equipment and services for a new process lab at UMass-Lowell aimed at developing the Bay State’s life sciences workforce.
The Billerica-based laboratory instruments maker‘s donation of clarification, chromatography, ultrafiltration/diafiltration and disposable mixing systems earned it the right to name the Millipore Corporation Process Development Laboratory, which will be used for downstream purification research and as a training facility.
Agion Technologies Inc. will supply its antimicrobial technology to a sexy new medical device coating offered by Biocoat Inc.
Horsham, Pa.-based Biocoat, which makes “lubricious” hydrophilic coatings for catheters, stents and respiratory tubes, will incorporate Agion’s silver zeolite technology into its formula.
The coating is designed to inhibit the growth of microbes on implanted medical devices.
Scientific services giant Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. will keep its environmental instruments business unit housed at the Cummings Center for another three years.
The Waltham-based laboratory instruments maker has 170 employees in 107,000 square feet of leased space at the Beverly facility. Thermo Fisher is the Cummings Center’s largest client, and has occupied space in the center since 1996, according to officials at Cummings Properties, LLC.
Thermo Fisher Scientific employs 34,000 people worldwide.
Medical device salespeople will no longer be able to drop in on physicians or make unsolicited calls to doctors in the Partners Healthcare system without a written invitation.
The Boston Globe first reported the stricter regulations, which are slated to go into effect October 1.
Partners Healthcare’s system includes Brigham and Women’s hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital Network and several other hospitals and clinics across the state.
NMT Medical Inc.’s StarFlex ventricular septum repair implant landed pre-market approval from the federal Food & Drug Administration.
The Boston-based company’s device is designed to be inserted into the hearts of patients with defects in the wall between the ventricular chambers.
The StarFlex implant closes the defect, preventing already-oxygenated blood from returning to the lungs before being pumped back into the body.
Eight medical device companies with operations in the Bay State made Forbes magazine’s “Global 2000” list.
The annual list ranks the world’s largest companies using a series of metrics including sales, profits, assets and market value.
Hurting hospital patients
Injuries from falls, bedsores and burns all sound like reasons to go to the hospital. But according to a new state Department of Public Health report, those are among the injuries about 300 people suffered in Massachusetts hospitals last year.
Aspect Medical Systems Inc. cut a deal with a New York investment fund rather than face a protracted and messy board fight.
The Norwood-based brain-monitoring equipment maker said it will support the nomination of Jon Biro and Melvin Keating, both of First Biomed LLC, to its board of directors for three-year terms starting in June. Keating will also be given a seat on the compensation committee and Biro will be appointed to the auditing committee.
Johns Hopkins University is jumping on the gifts ban bandwagon, following Massachusetts in outright forbidding its doctors from receiving most gifts from medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The school’s ban (PDF) bars doctors from receiving gifts, entertainment or food from medical device and drug companies..
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.
