GE Healthcare to Distribute Gamma Medica-Ideas Preclinical Imaging Systems

Gamma Medica-Ideas (GM-I; Northridge, CA, USA) and GE Healthcare (Chalfont St. Giles, UK) announced at the 55th annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, held in New Orleans, LA, USA, in June 2008, that GE Healthcare will be the exclusive distributor of Gamma Medica-Ideas' preclinical imaging systems effective July 1, 2008.

Pre-Clinical imaging plays a key role in new pharmaceutical therapeutic development by allowing researchers to visualize the structure, function, and response of laboratory animals in vivo. The agreement complements GE Healthcare's range of preclinical products, and grants researchers greater access to GM-I's digital trimodality positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), and computed tomography (CT) scanners.

"This agreement is an opportunity for customers to gain greater access to our hybrid scanners by leveraging the extensive footprint of GE Healthcare,” said Bradley Patt, Ph.D., president and CEO of GM-I. "We were first to market a trimodal preclinical scanner, and our all-digital technology provides improved spatial resolution, while enabling researchers to share images easily-bringing digital pathology to the preclinical arena.”

Gamma Medica-Ideas have installed more than 50 multimodality systems on four continents since 2002. The company's first-to-market all-digital technologies have made it a leader in preclinical imaging systems. "GE Healthcare is excited to be working with Gamma Medica-Ideas,” said Gene Saragnese, vice president and general manager, molecular imaging and CT, GE Healthcare. "This agreement underscores our deep commitment to the molecular imaging and preclinical markets. Many innovations in clinical imaging get their start in the preclinical devices, and we continue to look to that space as a showcase for what's possible for the future of human PET, SPECT, and CT imaging.”

GE Healthcare already provides dual-modality PET/CT, cadmium zinc telluride- (CZT)-based SPECT/CT and dedicated in vivo and specimen preclinical CT scanners. The agreement with GM-I brings scaleable and upgradeable trimodal (PET/SPECT/CT) systems under the GE umbrella.

"Researchers across the globe will reap the benefits of the combined multimodality pre-clinical portfolio of GE Healthcare and Gamma Medica-Ideas accelerating studies to investigate disease biology and develop new drugs,” said James Mitchell, general manager, molecular imaging technologies, GE Healthcare. "This agreement makes for a one-stop-shop for pre-clinical imaging devices.”

Gamma Medica-Ideas (GM-I) designs, builds, and services imaging systems based on novel technologies to improve patient health through early diagnosis of disease, improved patient treatment and by enabling new drug discovery. The company's core digital imaging technologies also hold great promise for a new class of solutions for the safety and security markets. In the pre-clinical space, GM-I's FLEX Triumph imaging platform is marketed for medical research and drug development. The FLEX Triumph system combines the PET (X-PET or its new digital LabPET), SPECT (X-SPECT), and CT (X-O) modalities in the world's first trimodality system. In the clinical space, GM-I offers LumaGEM, its dual-headed Molecular Breast Imaging- (MBI)-based system for early diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. The digital gamma ray imaging technology in LumaGEM provides significant advances in resolution and contrast, which has allowed for identification of millimeter-sized breast cancers missed by mammography, particularly in women with dense breast tissue.


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