Philips Healthcare, State of Ohio Announce Global Advanced Imaging Innovation Center

A $33.5 million commitment by Philips Healthcare and a $5 million Third Frontier grant from the state of Ohio will provide researchers at Case Western Reserve University, University Hospitals Case Medical Center, and Philips an opportunity to create medical imaging systems that will detect disease far earlier and be safer for patients than current methods.

The company and state announced the creation of the Global Advanced Imaging Innovation Center, to be housed at the University Hospitals Case Medical Center campus, at the same press conference where Gov. Ted Strickland designated Cleveland’s Health-Tech Corridor a state Hub of Innovation and Opportunity yesterday.

The corridor, created by the non-profit BioEnterprise and the economic-development corporation MidTown Cleveland, runs from downtown to University Circle. It includes Case Western Reserve, University Hospitals Case Medical Center (UHCMC), the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland State University, Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, and St. Vincent Charity Medical Center along with 75 biomedical companies, 45 technology companies and seven business incubators.

“We are pleased that the State of Ohio has awarded Ohio Third Frontier funding to our project,” said Jay Mazelsky, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Computed Tomography and Nuclear Medicine at Philips Healthcare. The company, which employs 1,100 in Highland Heights, has committed more than $6 million annually for five years, to the project.

“The goals of this center will be to provide strategic research, development and clinical validation for advanced imaging technologies, further developing our presence in northeast Ohio and building on our existing partnerships with Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals.”

Using Phillip’s latest imagers, physicians and researchers from CWRU will help develop a variety of medical imaging technologies expected to enable doctors to see into the body’s molecules and atoms, revealing anatomical and functional information currently unattainable. They will test and improve imagers to provide for earlier diagnostics and better tracking of disease progression while increasing safety and comfort to patients.

Case Western Reserve is the lead agency for the state’s $5 million grant supporting the effort.

“This award is emblematic of the way that members of this corridor work together to achieve more than any organization could alone,” Case Western Reserve President Barbara R. Snyder said of the Third Frontier grant.

Snyder recounted the success CWRU has had in generating business and collaborating with hospitals and industry. As a result of professors’ research, the university has launched 24 companies since 2001; reaped $16.3 million in licensing revenue last year alone; and won an average of $385 million in state, federal and other grants during the last five years. In 2007, Case Western Reserve became lead agency, partnering with University Hospitals and Cleveland Clinic, on a $64 million Clinical and Translational Science Award – the largest single grant the National Institutes of Health has made in Northeast Ohio.

The announcements were made at the BioEnterprise building, in a room packed with Health-Tech Corridor boosters and members, including Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Tim Hagan, Cleveland Foundation President Ronn Richard and officials from UHCMC, Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Clinic and media.

The hub overlays the corridor. The new state designation comes with a $250,000 grant and gives research and development within the hub priority for future state grants.

Baiju Shah, president of BioEnterprise, said the Dutch-owned Philips could have chosen any location worldwide, but, “Their decision to locate their Center within the Cleveland Health-Tech Corridor is an example of what can happen when public entities led by the State of Ohio, private institutions, philanthropy and nonprofits collaborate.”

Good Morning America visits new heart imaging device in Cleveland

Dr. Marco Costa found a second blocked artery in Mack Bailey’s heart — and demonstrated to a Good Morning America audience the first vascular-imaging technology based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) — at the same time Thursday.

Costa is an interventional cardiologist and director of the cardiovascular research institute at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Bailey is a 60-year-old Clevelander with had a heart attack and is being treated by Costa.

Both agreed to be filmed and interviewed by the NBC morning news show because University Hospitals is the first — and so far only — hospital to use the C7-XR Imaging System and accompanying C7 Dragonfly Imaging Catheter made by LightLab Imaging Inc. during patient heart procedures.

While using the technology to place a stent in one of Bailey’s heart arteries, Costa found a second blocked artery that had not shown up on images of Bailey’s heart. Costa ended up placing two stents, that day.

“If he had gone home this weekend without having this procedure today, he would have gone home with a very nice, well-placed stent in the vessel that did not cause the heart attack,” Costa said during the Good Morning America segment.

The LightLab system uses near-infrared light to produce high-resolution, real-time images that are better and faster than images produced by competing ultrasound technology. The system recently was approved for sale by the Food and Drug Administration. UH Case Medical Center was the core laboratory on the FDA approval study and analyzed the study’s results, according to the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine blog.

Impotence plus heart disease ups death risk – Dr. Sahil Parikh discusses the study

Reuters Report ::

Men with heart disease who also have erectile dysfunction die sooner than men who do not seek treatment for impotence, researchers reported on Monday.

They found that men who had both conditions were twice as likely to die from any cause and twice as likely to have a heart attack than men with heart disease alone.

The researchers expressed concern that using drugs such as Pfizer’s Viagra or Eli Lilly’s Cialis to treat erectile dysfunction could mask the symptoms that point to widespread heart and artery disease and said men complaining of impotence should be checked by a cardiologist.

“Erectile dysfunction is something that regularly should be addressed in the medical history of patients; it might be a symptom of early atherosclerosis,” Dr. Michael Bohm of the University of Saarland in Germany, who led the study, said in a statement.

His team studied 1,519 men in 13 countries taking part in some larger studies of various heart disease treatments. As part of the study the men were also asked about erectile dysfunction.

More than half of them, 55 percent, did, Bohm’s team said in a report published in the journal Circulation and also presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology.

During the two years of the study, 11.3 percent of the patients who reported erectile dysfunction died, compared to 5.6 percent of those with mild or no impotence problems.

“It has long been known that erectile dysfunction is a marker for cardiovascular disease,” said Dr. Sahil Parikh at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, who was not involved in the study.

The first impotence drug, Pfizer’s Viagra, known generically as sildenafil, was at first developed to lower blood pressure, he said.

“They realized it had this other effect, which patients quite enjoyed,” Parikh said in a telephone interview.

HAPPY SIDE-EFFECT

Viagra and rival drugs such as Eli Lilly’s Cialis and Bayer AG’s BAYG.DE Levitra all work by increasing blood flow.

“In order to have proper erectile function, you have to have adequate blood flow to the genitals. If you have atherosclerosis, whether in the arteries on the neck, which can cause stroke, or the arteries of the heart, which can cause heart attack … it is the same disease.”

But while the erectile dysfunction drugs help blood flow all over the body, they do not treat the underlying hardening and narrowing in the arteries that is causing the problem.

“If patients have erectile dysfunction, we have to be very aggressive about screening and treating them for heart disease,” Parikh said.

When Viagra came onto the market, many health experts welcomed it as a way to get men who might otherwise neglect their health to go to a doctor. But Bohm and Parikh both agreed that patients — and their doctors — need to look hard at the hearts of men with erectile dysfunction.

“Men with ED going to a general practitioner or a urologist need to be referred for a cardiology workup to determine existing cardiovascular disease and proper treatment,” Bohm said.

“The medication works and the patient doesn’t show up any more,” he added. “These men are being treated for the ED, but not the underlying cardiovascular disease.”

The drugs are wildly popular. Viagra alone had sales of nearly $2 billion in 2009.

Ohio Third Frontier approves biomedical project, investing grants

The Ohio Third Frontier Commission on Wednesday approved $20 million in Wright Project grants, including nearly $9 million for three biomedical projects.

During their first meeting since voters approved an extension and expansion of the Ohio Third Frontier through fiscal 2015, commissioners also approved $11 million in entrepreneurial support and pre-seed investment fund grants, as well as a fiscal 2011 budget between $125 million and $143 million.

Third Frontier is the 10-year, $1.35 billion program to re-energize Ohio’s economy by investing in projects in five industry clusters, including biomedical. Early this month, voters added $700 million in bond proceeds and four years to the program.

The five commissioners who attended Wednesday’s meeting voted unanimously to fund seven Wright Project grant proposals, including:
Cleveland Clinic: $3 million for its Clinically Applied Rehabilitation Engineering project, which aims at developing, testing, manufacturing and commercializing advanced, rehabilitative medical products for patients suffering from cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, metabolic and musculoskeletal diseases. Collaborators: Parker Hannifin Corp., Bertec Corp., Case Western Reserve University and the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center.

Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland: $2.1 million for its Development of a Quantitative Analysis System for Stem Cells project, which focuses on research commercialization of non-embryonic stem cells from umbilical cord blood as part of a Food and Drug Administration-licensed therapy to help some transplant patients and for testing. Collaborators: Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, Cleveland Clinic, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cleveland Cord Blood Center, BioInVision, Athersys (NASDAQ: ATHX), PerkinElmer, Thermogenesis (NASDAQ: KOOL), GE Healthcare (NYSE: GE), Hospira and Lakeland Community College.

University of Cincinnati: $3 million for its project, The Ohio Center for Microfluidic Innovation — New Products and Competitive Manufacturing of Emerging Biomedical Applications. The project wants to study, make and commercialize microfluidics technology, which could generate more valuable test results from a much smaller fluid sample than current technology. National Academies reviewers suggested the project be scaled back to just its biomedical applications. Collaborators: Siloam Biosciences, Gamma Dynamics, Sun Chemical and EnMonT.

Third Frontier advisers and commissioners spent a lot of time Wednesday debating “continuity” issues among entrepreneurial support and pre-seed investment funds that already have received grants. Facing state budget challenges, the program limited awards to only organizations that have received past money:

Cleveland Clinic was awarded $2 million for its Ohio BioValidation Fund III, which will invest in promising early stage biomedical companies.

JumpStart Inc., the venture development organization in Cleveland that has invested in several biomedical and healthcare companies, will receive $4 million for operations and investments. JumpStart gets an additional $1.8 million for its bioscience and entrepreneurial network, which will provide entrepreneurial services to bioscience start-ups in the Northeast Ohio region. Collaborators: BioEnterprise, Great Lakes Innovation and Development Enterprise and the Akron Global Business Accelerator.

North Coast Angel Fund II in Mayfield Heights is getting $2 million to invest in high-potential, early stage technology companies.

Ohio TechAngel Fund III in Columbus was awarded $825,000 to invest in early stage Ohio-based technology companies, with a strong emphasis on healthcare innovations and information technology.

TechColumbus is getting $500,000 to continue investing in early-to-late-stage technologystart-ups in Central Ohio. Focus areas of the fund are bioscience, information technology and advanced materials.

Third Frontier commissioners put off votes on three more entrepreneurial support and pre-seed fund grant proposals, asking for more information with plans to vote on those proposals in June.

As for next year’s fiscal budget, the commissioners plan to award $20 million to entrepreneurial support and pre-seed funds, as well as $7 million to both biomedical and medical imaging grant-seekers. The commissioners also budgeted $8 million for a new Wright Center Success Fund, which will invest operating dollars in existing centers of innovation.