Don’t let it be said that a telemedicine startup that bills itself as an ATM for healthcare is lacking in optimism.

The top executive with Columbus, Ohio-based HealthSpot told Columbus Business First that the startup projects that it’ll hit $1 billion in annual revenue within five years. Even with the telemedicine market expected to boom in the coming years, that seems like a tall order for what it is now a relatively obscure, unknown and early stage company.

Regardless, HealthSpot has some prominent (and deep-pocketed) backers and believers to help it reach that goal.

Cardinal Health (NYSE:CAH) — a $100 billion company in its own right — confirmed to Columbus Business First that it has taken a minority stake in HealthSpot and is marketing the startup’s medical-care kiosks to independent and regional pharmacy customers. A Cardinal spokesman told the media outlet that HealthSpot’s kiosks “allow retail pharmacies to offer their patients all the benefits of an in-store clinic, at a fraction of the cost.”

HealthSpot’s investors and advisers also include former Gartner CEO Manny Fernandez, MemberHealth founder Chuck Hallberg and  former Cleveland Clinic CEO Floyd Loop. The company has raised about $6 million in investment funding over 18 months.

HealthSpot will make its money by taking a cut of the $60 per-visit fee from its 9- by 5-foot telemedicine kiosks, as well as charging a leasing fee to customers that host the sites, such as pharmacies, nursing homes or large employers.

HealthSpot envisions patients using its kiosks for a variety of primary care needs — minor illnesses, skin conditions, allergies and the like. Each kiosk comes equipped with high-definition videoconferencing capabilities, plus integrated digital medical equipment that can sends doctors diagnostic information like temperature and blood pressure.

Medical products supplier Cardinal Health (NYSE:CAH) has released a new surgical mask that offers a better fit and features “fog-reduction technology.”

Cardinal’s Smart-Seal surgical mask features a “cinch-and-hug,” single-tie design that creates a custom seal around the wearer’s nose and mouth, according to a statement from Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal.

The new mask also boasts closed-cell foam and a fog-reducing vapor barrier, according to Cardinal.

“The Smart-Seal mask offers the next evolution in surgical mask protection, addressing not only fog and fit, but also providing the highest level of filtration and fluid resistance,” said Lisa Ashby, president of category management.

Cardinal is scheduled to release its second-quarter earnings information on Thursday.

Ted Ford

One thing TechColumbus founder Ted Ford has learned since founding the central Ohio technology advocacy organization is that you can’t plan an entrepreneurial economy.

“You can’t do a five-year plan on doing an entrepreneurial economy,” Ford told the Columbus Dispatch in a wide-ranging interview that looked back on his tenure. “We need to be willing to broadly fertilize the region and find the most interesting and compelling ideas. You have to create the conditions, provide the support and then surprises happen — and that’s a good thing.”

TechColumbus has helped develop several healthcare startups that include surgical products company Minimally Invasive Devices and MRI-compatible treadmill company EXCMR.

Ford singled out for praise a technology transfer and commercialization program from Columbus-area health system OhioHealth.

“One of biggest surprises was how strongly OhioHealth has been embracing technology commercialization,” he said. “What we didn’t anticipate was the number of doctors and nurses who had ideas that turn into companies.”

(Read MedCity News’ profile of OhioHealth’s commercialization program here.)

Ford announced his intention to resign from TechColumbus in October. TechColumbus’ vice president for membership and marketing is acting as temporary CEO while the organization looks for a permanent chief.

HealthSpot aims to place its “Care4 Station” kiosks in locations like pharmacies, grocery stores and employer sites, and plans to begin rolling out the kiosks in the first quarter. The company plans to start with Ohio customers, and then go national.

CEO Steve Cashman likened HealthSpot to an “ATM for healthcare,” because the company is similarly looking to create greater access and convenience for users through its technology. He describes the company’s mission as to create the “highest-quality, most efficient healthcare appointment.”

HealthSpot envisions patients using its kiosks for a variety of primary care needs — minor illnesses, skin conditions allergies and the like. Each kiosk comes equipped with high-definition videoconferencing capabilities, plus integrated digital medical equipment that can sends doctors diagnostic information like temperature and blood pressure.

An attendant would be on hand for technical help and to clean the kiosk. Cost per appointment will range from $59 to $69, Cashman said.

Noted Cleveland product development firm Nottingham Spirk helped design the kiosks.

“We’ve  put a large amount of our time into making sure the consumer experience is just over the top,” Cashman said.

Cashman said HealthSpot’s kiosks will provide a better experience than retail clinics because patients will have appointments with doctors rather than nurses, and offer an enhanced continuum of care by allowing a patient to visit with the same doctor for each appointment. In theory, a patients could visit with their own primary care physicians, assuming that the physician had signed up to be a HealthSpot provider. Plus, HealthSpot’s appointment costs are also on par with those of retail clinics, Cashman said.

In addition to product development, much of HealthSpot’s recent focus has been on establishing partnerships with medical providers and customers. Cashman promises some “major announcements” with pharmacy and grocery customers during the new year. HealthSpot is currently running a pilot with primary care group Central Ohio Primary Care.

The company earlier this month announced a marketing partnership with a Columbus-area contractor aimed at landing HealthSpot’s kiosks in military facilities and other U.S. government groups in remote locations.

HealthSpot has thus far pulled in about $6 million in equity and counts some prominent names among its investors and advisors, including former Gartner CEO Manny Fernandez and MemberHealth founder Chuck Hallberg. Another big name and industry heavy hitter, former Cleveland Clinic CEO Floyd Loop, recently joined HealthSpot’s board.

HealthSpot even has a prominent institutional investor, Columbus-area pharmaceuticals distributor Cardinal Health (NYSE:CAH), Ohio’s largest company by revenues. A Cardinal spokeswoman declined to confirm an investment in HealthSpot. “We generally don’t disclose details around non-material investments,” she said.

HealthSpot will likely look for some growth capital to fund its anticipated national expansion, but for now is focused on securing customers and partners, Cashman said.

Departing TechColumbus CEO Ted Ford

Nonprofit economic development group TechColumbus has appointed its vice president for membership and marketing as interim CEO while the group searches for a permanent chief executive.

Tim Haynes, who joined TechColumbus in 2006, starts as interim CEO on Jan. 1. Ted Ford, who spent six years as the group’s CEO, in October announced that he’d leave the post at the end of this year.

Prior to TechColumbus, Haynes spent seven years with Mettler-Toledo International, which makes scales and laboratory equipment.

Dwight Smith, chairman of TechColumbus’ board of directors, is leading the search for a permanent CEO. “With Tim in place, TechColumbus will not miss a beat during this period of transition,” he said.

TechColumbus has helped develop several healthcare startups, including surgical products company Minimally Invasive Devices and MRI-compatible treadmill company EXCMR.

In a prepared statement, Ford said it was “premature” to publicly discuss his future plans. TechColumbus’ board of directors has launched a search for Ford’s successor.

“I think it’s time to pass the baton to the next leader and to look for ways I can help advance other initiatives that accelerate our region’s growth,” Ford said.

During Ford’s tenure, TechColumbus raised more than $43 million in state and matching funds to find, coach and finance dozens of startups, according to the statement. TechColumbus also helped with the expansion of the Ohio TechAngel Fund, which recently topped a list from Entrepreneur.com of the nation’s largest angel funds ranked by number of members.

TechColumbus has helped develop several healthcare startups including surgical products company Minimally Invasive Devices and MRI-compatible treadmill company EXCMR.

The FloShield's tip

Laparoscopic surgery company Minimally Invasive Devices has released a new version of its visualization device that removes debris from the tip of a laparoscope.

The new product, the FloShield PLUS, features a novel cleaning agent that allows for cleaning of the end of a laparoscope without removing it from a patient’s abdominal cavity, according to a statement from Columbus-based Minimally Invasive Devices (MID).

The device also uses patented airflow technology to defog and deflect debris from a laparoscope’s tip. MID obtained U.S. regulatory clearance for the original FloShield device in 2008.

The company has already begun a limited release of the new FloShield PLUS, and expects a full-market release in the first quarter of 2012.

In testing of the new device, any required lens cleanings were performed within the abdominal cavity without removing the laparoscope from the patient in the first 19 test cases, according to MID.

Last year, MID signed a U.S. distribution deal with San Diego-based CareFusion for the FloShield.

The device received European regulatory clearance earlier this year.

The clinical test’s chief goal is to compare the performance of the company’s stress test against competing alternatives and fine-tune the treadmill’s design, plus its installation and servicing processes.

“Launching this pilot is an important milestone for us to show that we can build, service and install these treadmill systems, and also demonstrate their superior clinical value,” said Gary Smith, the Columbus, Ohio-based company’s acting CEO.

The company says its treadmill system enables physicians to more quickly, cheaply and safely diagnose cardiovascular disease via “peak stress tests” that evaluate heart function. The key is that the treadmill is built without magnetic parts, which means it can be housed inside a Mechanical Resonance Imaging (MRI) room.

The thinking is that administering an MRI immediately after stepping off a treadmill can better measure heart function and blood flow and, as a result, cut down on the need for multiple testing, catching some heart problems earlier.

Treadmill exercise stress tests are typically performed using echocardiographic and nuclear imaging processes, but EXCMR says MRIs are more accurate than either of those alternatives (better diagnostic capabilities) and safer than nuclear imaging (no radiation exposure).

EXCMR is hoping to obtain U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance and begin commercializing the treadmill by the end of 2012. To support that commercialization, the company is targeting a $750,000 round of angel investment that it’s looking to close around the end of this year.

EXCMR’s target customers for the  treadmill, which is expected to sell for $105,000, are large hospitals that perform MRIs on heart patients. The company has already scored an early win, inking a marketing partnership with medical equipment giant Siemens Healthcare.

Since it was launched in 2009, EXCMR has raised about $3.5 million in grant funding from sources including state-supported technology group TechColumbus, the Cleveland Clinic’s Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center and the National Institutes of Health, Smith said.

Specifically, OSU researchers will study the chemical signals that drive re-growth of damaged pathways after spinal cord injury. The researchers hope to find that altering cellular behavior promotes repair of an injured spinal cord, according to a statement from the Ohio State University College of Medicine.

The researchers have drawn their inspiration from the animal world. For example, salamanders can regenerate their spinal cords after injury because their cells form a bridge across the injury site.

However, when a spinal cord injury occurs in humans, the same types of cells receive different signals and a scar forms, preventing the re-growth of nerve cells, according to lead researcher Lyn Jakeman, an associate professor of physiology and cell biology.

“We want to understand the growth factors and signaling molecules that can promote the formation of cell bridges so we can develop new therapies that target existing cells in the human spinal cord,” Jakeman said.

The grant comes from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

In particular, positron emission tomography  (PET) radiopharmaceuticals — which are used to aid in imaging scans for cancer, heart disease and brain disorders — are poised to be a big growth area for Cardinal, Columbus Business First reports.

Cardinal’s been in the nuclear medicine business for several years. It built its business on single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) drugs, which incorporate radioactive metals that emit low-energy radiation detected by a type of gamma camera. But PET is where the future of nuclear medicine lies for Cardinal.

“The PET business can be equal if not larger than what we’ve seen in the low-energy side … in a pretty near-term horizon,” John Rademacher, president of nuclear and specialty pharmacy services at Cardinal, told Columbus Business First.

To get an idea of why nuclear medicine is important to Cardinal, look no further than the margins associated with the business. A Deutsche Bank analyst estimated that Cardinal’s revenue from the business is just $750 million — less than 1 percent of Cardinal’s overall revenue — but margins for the nuclear medicine business are in the high single digits.

Contrast that with margins from the biggest part of Cardinal’s business, drug distribution to bulk customers like big pharmacies, that posted razor-thin margins of 0.3 percent.

Plus, the market for PET and SPECT radiopharmaceuticals is expected to enjoy healthy growth in the coming years. U.S. sales of SPECT and PET radiopharmaceuticals reached $1.2 billion in 2010 and are expected to rise to $6 billion by 2018, according to a recent report from Bio-Tech Systems.

In light of the emerging radiopharmaceuticals, Cardinal has been striking collaborations with universities and drug companies “to assist these innovators in developing their products,” Rademacher told MedCity News last year. Such collaborations will likely give Cardinal the first shot at commercializing any drugs that result from the partnerships.

Most significantly to Neoprobe, the meeting confirmed the company’s opportunity to develop a humanized antibody rather than a mouse-based antibody in its clinical development of RIGScan, a radiopharmaceutical targeting agent used to detect tumors left behind after colon cancer surgery, according to a statement from Dublin, Ohio-based Neoprobe.

The potential mouse-to-human shift regarding the antibody is important because Neoprobe says the humanized structure would better position the drug for regulatory approval, partnering, commercialization and enhanced intellectual property protection opportunities.

An antibody is a protein that can be produced by the body’s immune system when it detects harmful substances, called antigens. In RIGScan’s case, the antibody is the substance that allows the drug to bind to a patient’s cancer cells.

“The opportunity to move away from an antiquated mouse-based antibody to a state-of-the-art humanized form can potentially provide important return on our investment,” CEO Mark Pykett said in the statement.

Neoprobe’s meeting was with officials from the European Medicines Agency (EMA), a regulatory group roughly equivalent to the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. Neoprobe conducted a similar meeting with FDA officials earlier this year, according to the statement.

Neoprobe says it must present detailed plans for clinical development to both the FDA and EMA to align, to the extent possible, the clinical studies required for approval of RIGScan.  The drug is likely several years away from approval.

The round was led by Michigan-based Lifeline Ventures, a new investor in Columbus, Ohio-based CardiOx, and included contributions from existing investors Early Stage Partners, Glengary and Reservoir Partners, CardiOx CEO Larry Heaton said.

CardiOx plans to file by the end of the year for both U.S. and European regulatory clearance of its heart test, Heaton said.

CardiOx is developing a noninvasive way to detect right-to-left heart shunts (a defect known as a patent foramen ovale or PFO), which in some people can lead to strokes, heart attacks and migraine headaches. CardiOx’s approach combines an injection of dye into a patient’s heart with sensors on the ear to determine the presence of a shunt. The device also can be used to verify that surgery succeeded in patching the hole.

Prior to the series C, CardiOx had raised about $5.5 million since its inception in 2006.

In addition to commercialization, the company plans to use the funding to step up manufacturing of its test and hire some employees. With CardiOx transitioning from product development to manufacturing, the company will need to hire several operations employees, Heaton said.

The company is wrapping up clinical trials of the test, Heaton said.

CardiOx will initially focus its test on the stroke market, which Heaton has estimated at $400 million annually in the U.S. and twice that worldwide.

Heaton estimated the wider market for the test — which would include other indications like migraines and sleep apnea — to be $1.1 billion annually in the U.S. and double that across the globe.

About 25 percent of the population is affected by PFO, but the vast majority show no symptoms associated with the condition. In patients who have stroke of unknown cause, the prevalence of PFO increases to about 40 percent, according to Cleveland Clinic.

Health Care DataWorks‘s multi-year deal with Presbyterian Healthcare Services represents the farthest west that the emerging health IT company has pushed in its quest to acquire new customers. Presbyterian is the fifth-largest health organization to become a Health Care DataWorks customer, said Van Chappell, the Columbus company’s vice president of sales.

“To secure these contracts we have competed against a number of larger, more-established  companies,” Chappell said. “This latest agreement puts us one step closer to developing what we consider a critical mass in terms of client engagements.”

Through its hospitals and clinics, Presbyterian is the largest healthcare provider in New Mexico, according to Health Care DataWorks.

With its enterprise data warehouse, Health Care DataWorks aims to help hospitals organize and combine the vast amounts of data  its clients generate, such as patient records, billing information, scheduling systems and  purchasing records.

The idea is that, by getting a better handle on all of the disparate data flowing through their organizations, hospital executives will be able to make more-informed decisions that could lead to efficiency gains, quality improvement and cost reduction.

The company licensed its software from Ohio State University Medical Center and a few of its executives are former OSUMC employees.

While the Columbus, Ohio emerging health IT startup has been around less than three years, its healthcare data warehousing technology stretches back a decade farther than that.

The former chief information officer with Ohio State University Medical Center (OSUMC) led a team that licensed from the university the technology that Health Care DataWorks was founded on. The company spent about a year adjusting and enhancing the software, which had been developed and used for about 10 years at OSUMC, to create a customizable package that can be implemented in hospitals throughout the country.

Now, the health IT startup could be poised to capitalize on what’s expected to be an explosion in healthcare data  — and hospitals’ struggles to make sense of it all.

“The problem our company solves is the ‘Tower of Babel‘ of data that exists in most hospitals and health systems,” said Smaltz, the company’s CEO. “We bring it all together in a homogeneous way to provide a unified view of all of the data that runs throughout an organization.”

Health Care DataWorks has already enjoyed some early victories, having implemented its technology at various stages in five hospitals, with negotiations ongoing at several others. Clients include Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus; BayCare Health System in Tampa, Florida; and Orlando Health in Central Florida. The company was also included in a list of five cool healthcare vendors by research firm Gartner earlier this year.

With its enterprise data warehouse, Health Care DataWorks aims to help hospitals organize and combine the vast amounts of data that are generated by hospitals — patient records, billing information, scheduling systems, purchasing records — and that’s just a few examples. The popular industry term for the separation of data into separate applications typically involves the word “silos.” Harnessing the power of so-called “Big Data” could help hospitals combine data that’s now isolated in numerous silos, boost efficiency, cut costs and improve care, the thinking goes.

“Big Data will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation and consumer surplus,” according to a report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. That’s probably even more true in the field of healthcare, in which billions of dollars in federal government incentives for electronic medical records is expected to create vast amounts of electronic data that, for the most part, lived only on paper before.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology said that big data holds the potential to “transform” the U.S. health system. That’s where Health Care DataWorks comes in.

The company’s enterprise data warehouse provides a pre-built model to organize the massive amounts of data flowing through a hospital. The advantage for hospitals is that it saves them the substantial time, expense and effort required to build their own data warehouse. Health Care DataWorks’s package also comes with dashboards and reporting tools to help hospital executives analyze the data.

Smaltz said it’s tough to arrive at a dollar figure illustrating the company’s market potential, but with more than 5,000 hospitals in the U.S., the company isn’t lacking for potential customers.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Health Care DataWorks is the size of its competition. Huge names in the world of technology such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft are players in the enterprise data warehouse market. When asked why a hospital would choose a young startup over such established players, Smaltz acknowledged that he gets that questions “all the time.”

Smaltz said he answers those concerns by burnishing his status as a former hospital CIO and talks about the many years the company’s system has been in place at OSUMC. “We’ve walked a mile in their shoes,” he said. “We have credibility in that we come from a health system. ”

That credibility has helped the company add about 10 employees this year, bringing its total to 26. Smaltz projects adding another 15 or so employees by the end of the year.

Part of the reason for the hiring binge is anticipated demand for the company’s cheaper, web-based, software-as-a-service version of its system, which would be ideal for smaller hospitals, Smaltz said. “We really think that’s going to be the future,” he said.

A partnership deal would help Nanofiber Solutions to get its cell-culture technology into the hands of more researchers and drug developers.

Columbus, Ohio-based Nanofiber Solutions sells cell culture dishes  that are filled with polymer nanofibers that more accurately simulate the 3-D structure of human tissue. Most lab testing occurs on human cells that are placed in flat, plastic cell-culture dishes and plates, which the company says yields less-accurate results.

The two-year-old Ohio State University  spinoff started selling its products earlier this year and has tasted some early success with about 15 paying customers, according to founder and Chief Technology Officer Jed Johnson, who hatched the idea for the company when he was a doctoral student at OSU.

Most of Nanofiber Solutions’s customers fall into one of three categories: pharmaceutical companies, stem cell developers and research institutions. The company’s nanofiber-filled culture dishes are especially effective for studying the migration of cancer cells, Johnson said.

Now, the company is looking for a cash infusion to ramp up production of its cell-culture plates, but Johnson said the company is looking for more than money. Ideally, the investment would come from a bigger player in the life sciences research market like Becton Dickinson, Corning or Millipore. That strategic partnership would then open up marketing channels for Nanofiber Solutions and help  the young company acquire new customers, the thinking goes. As an added bonus, the strategic partner would then become a potential acquirer of the Ohio startup.

“We go back and forth on angel investors, but we’re really looking more for more of a strategic partner rather than a pure cash infusion,” Johnson said. “If we go the angel route, we wouldn’t necessarily get new leads or business.”

Nanofiber Solutions has raised about $500,000 in investment funding over its lifetime.

The company also hopes to take advantage of increased market demand. In addition to medical products, nanofibers are used in a host of other applications,  including filtration and energy.

The nanofiber products market was $80.7 million in 2009, according to BCC Research. That market is forecast to reach $2.2 billion in total revenue by 2020. Mechanical and chemical applications account for more than 70 percent of that market right now.

Other medical applications of nanofiber include an Oregon company, HemCon Medical Technologies, which has developed a bandage employing nanofibers that consists of different layers that can absorb fluids, deliver antibiotics and stop blood. Brown University scientists are developing a nanofiber patch for the heart that is intended to help the regeneration of dead cardiac tissue.

The two-year grant from the Department of Defense will fund a study into the use of brown algae extracted from seaweed and giant kelp to prevent the formation of biofilms on wounds, according to a statement from the university.

Microbial biofilms  that form at wound sites tend to resist treatment and can create infections in patients. Biofilms are an “intractable problem” for wound healing, a Johns Hopkins physician told Microbe Magazine.

Biofilms are linked to 60 percent of all chronic infections in the U.S. alone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and also pose a significant threat to soldiers who suffer from burn wounds acquired in active duty, according to the statement.

The research will be led by Chandan Sen, professor and vice chair for research in Ohio State’s Department of Surgery.

“New treatments with topical agents that inhibit biofilm formation or promote their detachment, and reduce wound infections, could have a tremendous impact not only for military medicine, but also for civilian hospitals, wound care centers and trauma units worldwide,” Sen said.

A sketch of Continental Dry Works' Pocket device

An Ohio startup thinks its male urinary incontinence device could be a big improvement over adult diapers for people who suffer from the condition. 

Columbus-based Continental Dry Works‘ male urinary incontinence product, called The Pocket, resembles an athletic cup and could easily be removed from the pants and discarded. The new innovative medical device features a layer of quick-drying mesh, similar to swimsuit netting, that would hold the user’s scrotum away from a layer of absorbent material that collects urine and sits inside a semi-rigid outer shell, according to company founder Heather Wilcox. 

A custom homes designer and owner of four Tim Hortons fast-food franchises around Columbus, Wilcox hatched the idea for the device. Her background “is a long way from designing male incontinence products,” she admitted, “but design is design.” 

Like many healthcare entrepreneurs, Wilcox’s foray into the field was driven by circumstances she’d have preferred not to have come about in the first place. That is, she saw her husband’s struggles and frustrations with existing urinary incontinence devices on the market after the condition was brought on by complications following his prostate cancer surgery. 

The leading  treatment options on the market — think Depend’s diaper-style briefs — were bulky, conspicuous, noisy and required her husband to buy new pants. “I became exasperated with what was on the market,” she said. “I started to think about designing something that would be invisible to the public but effective to the user.” 

So Wilcox started sketching out ideas and doing market research. She pegs the annual U.S. market for male incontinence products at $700 million, though that number applies to fecal incontinence as well. “With Baby Boomers retiring, the senior-care products market is getting ready to explode,” she said. 

Continental Dry Works has received a $50,000 grant from state-backed development group TechColumbus and is applying for a $100,000 National Institutes of Health grant. The funding has gone toward producing prototypes of the device and paying for legal services for intellectual property protection, Wilcox said. 

A key next step for the company involves contracting with a research firm to conduct a consumer study of The Pocket, in which patients who suffer from male urinary incontinence will be asked to compare the device to other treatments for the condition. Before it commercializes the device, Continental Dry Works is waiting until it obtains patent protection, a process that Wilcox estimates will take 12 to 18 months. 

Wilcox hopes to eventually license the device to a consumer products company such as Procter & Gamble or Kimberly-Clark.

However, it’ll likely be a year or two before Columbus, Ohio-based PercuVision rolls out version 2.0 of its DirectVision System, which is designed to address urinary catheter problems and improve the Foley catheter procedure.

“What we’re trying to do is to really simplify the features and lower the cost,” said Earl Singh, the company’s chief operating officer. “That will give us the opportunity for better market traction.”

For example, the, first-generation version features a camera that can focus, but that’s really not necessary when dealing with a space as small as the inside of the urethra, according to Singh. The focusing camera’s presence in the device was a result of the company’s go-to market strategy.

“The strategy was to get to the market as fast as could,” Singh said. “We tried to take as many off-the-shelf components as we could to get to the market quickly.”

Also on the company’s agenda is obtaining the CE Mark, which would give it the right to sell the device in the European Union. That’s also a year or two away.

PercuVision was recently awarded a $1 million grant from the state’s Third Frontier technology acceleration program to help the new version of the system.

The company describes its product as a “visual guide” through the urethra that could cut down on urinary catheter problems from bad insertions, and thus cut healthcare costs by reducing catheter-related damage from the procedure. The product, in essence, is a catheter with a flashlight and camera at the end. Nurses, who usually perform catheter insertions, can see the catheter’s path and will be more likely to complete the procedure smoothly and quickly the first time, according to the company.

It’s intended for use by operating-room and emergency-room nurses, said Singh. His brother, Dr. Errol Singh, is the company’s founder and a urologist with the OhioHealth System in the Columbus area.

In August 2009, PercuVision received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market its device.

Aside from lower the cost of its device, another key for PercuVision will be signing operating partnerships with companies that can assist with sales and marketing and distribution. “We don’t plan on organically growing all those things and doing all that in house,” Singh said. “That’s not the business model.”

The 15-employee company has thus far raised $6 million from angel investors. Singh hopes to have doubled that number of employees in about two years. Thus far, four hospitals have purchased PercuVision’s system and several more are evaluating it, Singh said.

The appointment of Dr. Charles Lockwood would be effective Sept. 1, and is subject to approval from the university’s board of trustees, according to a statement from the university.

A professor at Yale, Lockwood also held the title of department chair of of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences. Prior to joining the Yale faculty he was chair of obstetrics and gynecology at New York University.

Lockwood’s primary clinical interests include the prevention of recurrent pregnancy loss, preterm delivery, and maternal thrombophilias, and he has been credited with helping to develop fetal fibronectin, the first biochemical predictor of prematurity, according to the statement.

The last full-time dean of OSU’s college of medicine, Chip Souba, left the school last year to become the dean of Dartmouth College’s medical school.

Dr. Catherine Lucey, who had been the school’s interim dean, recently accepted a job as dean of education at the University of California at San Francisco’s medical school.

Factoring in the customary 10-month review period by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, that would make a decision on the application for the drug used in cancer treatments likely to come in the middle of next year, said Mark Pykett, CEO of the Dublin-Ohio  based company.

Pykett declined to be more specific on exactly when Neoprobe might file the New Drug Application (NDA) beyond stating the oft-repeated third quarter timeframe. The company plans to make a public announcement once it has filed the NDA.

“We think the filing will be viewed as an important event for the company and we want to share the information with our shareholders and the public as we meet that milestone,” he said.

Neoprobe officials and various regulatory consultants are in the midst of performing quality checks on the document, Pykett said.

Lymphoseek is a radiopharmaceutical used by surgeons to identify lymph nodes in patients with breast cancer or melanoma and to indicate whether cancer has spread to a particular lymph node.

Yesterday, the company announced plans to open a European unit that will initially be staffed virtually by U.S. employees. “It’s intended to allow us to be active in the European market to do development and commercialization work,” Pykett said. “We’re not expecting to have on-the-ground staff there” in the early going.

Pykett declined to provide any timeframe on when Neoprobe might file for the CE Mark, which, if awarded, would give the Ohio company the right to begin selling Lymphoseek in the European Union.

Neoprobe is currently in discussions with potential European distribution and sales and marketing partners. Cardinal Health (NYSE: CAH) is handling U.S. distribution and sales and marketing of Lymphoseek.

Neoprobe puts Lymphoseek’s annual worldwide market potential at $450 million. CFO Brent Larson stressed that the number represents the drug’s “reachable” market and is in no way a revenue projection. Here’s how Larson broke down the $450 million number: U.S. ($200 million); European Union ($70 million); rest of the world ($180 million).

Neoprobe’s stock is in the midst of a nearly two-month-long 40 percent slide, brought on after a New York hedge fund manager who is shorting the stock began speaking out against the company.

However, an analyst (who told MedCity News in March that his company holds equity in Neoprobe) spoke glowingly about Lymphoseek yesterday in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch.

The drug “will do more to improve the outcome of oncology patients than probably any other product that I have seen in the last 20 years,” said  Steve Brozak, president of WBB Securities. “This is one where it’s truly different. In an environment where people are talking about healthcare rationing and reduced expectations, you have a product that’s not just superior but will provide for a new standard in the treatment of cancer.”

The device is used to stop liquid from gathering at the tip of and obstructing the view of a laparoscope by  employing airflow to defog and deflect debris from the laparoscope’s lens, according to a statement  from the Columbus, Ohio-based company. Laparoscopy  is a type of surgery that features a tube with a small, lighted camera placed through an incision in a patient’s midsection and allows a surgeon to see the contents of the patient’s abdomen or pelvis.

Receiving the European Union’s CE Mark opens up a new market for the 14-employee startup, which was founded in 2007 by CEO Wayne Poll, a surgeon. The company has not yet secured a European distributor, but Poll said Minimally Invasive Devices (MID) has been contacted by several who have shown interest in the FloShield.

MID obtained U.S. regulatory clearance for the FloShield in 2008. The device is in “early distribution” in the U.S. and in use at about 40 hospitals. Last year, MID signed a U.S. distribution deal  with San Diego-based CareFusion for the device.

The company raised $1.5 million late last year.

Poll got the idea for his company while in the operating rooms at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, which is part of the OhioHealth  system. A specialist in minimally invasive procedures, particularly kidney cancer, Poll was frustrated that he needed to clear the tip of the laparoscope that guided him as he worked.

And Columbus, Ohio-based DIRAmed said it would be willing to move out of the state if it can land new investment, CEO Will Shain said.

“We are currently considering a move out of Ohio to relocate the company to a more favorable region for an early stage medical device company that is focused in in-vitro diagnostics,” Shain said in an e-mail, adding that he wouldn’t reveal any further details about a possible move until the company makes a final decision.

DIRAmed is one of several companies developing a diabetes glucose monitor to allow diabetics to check blood-sugar levels without drawing blood or pricking the skin. By making the process easier and less painful, a noninvasive meter could greatly increase diabetics’ adherence to tracking their blood glucose levels.

If the company succeeds in its goal of raising $2.5 million, the funding would go toward hiring staff in engineering and chemometrics, plus further clinical studies of its device, Shain said. DIRAmed is still in the early stages of the fund-raise, with one investor contributing $80,000 so far, according to a regulatory document.

The funding would cover DIRAmed’s costs for 18 months, said Shain, a former executive with Steris and Covidien. At the end of that 18-month period, Shain hopes that DIRAmed will have shown enough clinical progress to attract a strategic development partner.

DIRAmed plans several clinical studies to continue fine-tuning its data-analysis and data-collection technology. The company is likely several years away from getting any products on the market. “We have a working model of a noninvasive glucose monitor, and must scale up our efforts to bring the working system through internal validation,” Shain said.

DIRAmed’s technology is based on Raman spectroscopy, which measures the scattering of light to help in molecular analysis. The device works by aiming a laser at a patient’s skin, and then using a camera to collect and analyze light scattered by the molecules in the skin to get a tissue glucose measurement.

The company began in 2002, but Shain joined last year. DIRAmed has raised about $3 million over its lifetime, primarily from angel investors.

Aside from the new business, the customer brought another benefit to Columbus, Ohio-based Connect for Healthcare. Because the client is based in Canada and requires a French-language version of the software, Connect for Healthcare was forced to tweak its technology to enable  it to be customized for multiple foreign languages. That could help open new geographic markets for the two-and-a-half-year-old company.

“The deal does two important things for us,” said Neil Moore, Connect for Healthcare’s CEO. “We now have a footprint in Canada with a market leader in that country. And, as a result of the requirement that our service become multilingual, it opens a global door for us.”

Moore said the company has had “a number of” inquiries from international customers, but couldn’t help them because “language was always an issue.”

Connect for Healthcare completed its first implementation for the Canadian client, Residences Allegro, in March and expects to be live in 42 locations throughout the country by the end of the month. Residences Allegro bills itself as the largest network of private retirement homes in Quebec and the third-largest in Canada.

The company’s subscription-based service allows for status updates via email, text message or the Web to an unlimited number of family members or friends. The updates feature “wellness metrics” (Is Mom eating? Sleeping? Walking?) that can be customized to reflect specific questions or concerns of family members.

Connect for Healthcare’s value proposition to providers is that its service increases patient and family satisfaction, saves staff time from having to field phone calls from family members and creates better and more frequent documentation.

In addition to selling to nursing homes and hospices, Connect for Healthcare has broken into one new market — adult day care — and is looking to add clients in another — behavioral health centers, such as those that provide counseling to substance abusers. The company recently signed a deal with Unity Health System in Rochester, New York, to provide its service to six adult day care centers, Moore said.

For the behavioral health market, the company’s software could be effective in providing patient status updates to the medical providers that referred patients to a facility, Moore said. He sees the behavioral health market holding potential of up to $50 million and said Connect for Healthcare received positive feedback at a recent meeting of the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers.

Like most startups, Connect for Healthcare could use a sales and marketing boost to grow revenue. The company is seeking a $500,000 investment for that reason. “It’s all about making things go bigger and faster,” Moore said.

The Columbus, Ohio-area company received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its iBag System, an FDA spokeswoman said. Future Path’s urine bag system could help prevent deaths from sepsis, a severe and life-threatening infection in which the bloodstream is overwhelmed by bacteria.

The company says its disposable vinyl bag and wireless urology monitoring sensors reduces the likelihood of urine spills and provides an early warning if bladder temperature increases, which can signal the possibility of infection. Infection and eventual deaths from sepsis can occur when urine bags become filled and backed up.

The iBag System will be available with a doctor’s prescription via the company’s web page and through select distribution partners which Future Path is now building.

The issue of combating hospital-acquired infections has taken on increased importance to the U.S. health system in recent years. A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that two of the most common types of hospital-acquired infections — sepsis and pneumonia — killed 48,000 people and increased health costs by $8.1 billion in 2006.

Urinary tract infections account for about 40 percent of all healthcare-associated infections, and the “overwhelming majority” of those are associated with catheters, Medscape News reported.

The company will initially target the home and rehabilitation hospital markets for patients who are quadriplegics or severely disabled. A second product that hasn’t received regulatory approval, UroSense, will be targeted toward the hospital intensive care unit market.

Like many healthcare startups, Future Path was born from personal tragedy suffered by the company’s founder. Christopher Bryant, the son of founder and chairman Ty Bryant, lived for about eight years as a quadriplegic after a diving accident. Christopher died in 2005 from  a case of sepsis that resulted from ulcers caused by a urine bag overflow in his hospital bed.

Bryant projects that the home market could support annual sales of about 40 million units, while the hospital market would support about 9 million units annually. Based on projected sales prices ($9 per bag), that would come out to a market opportunity of about $360 million annually for the iBag (home) and about $160 million for the UroSense (hospital).

Bryant wouldn’t provide specifics on when Future Path might file for regulatory approval of the hospital-targeted urine management system, saying it would happen “as soon as possible.”

The company is raising $400,000 to help fund manufacturing and distribution of its products, Bryant said. He declined to specify how much investment capital the company has pulled in since its inception.

Future Path recently hired a CEO, Brian Gilbert, who has experience in wireless technology from working with Cisco and various startups.

The company has filed for three patents around its technology and has thus far been issued one.

Sister Helen Prejean

The capital punishment-opposing nun prominently featured in the movie “Dead Man Walking” has asked Cardinal Health (NYSE: CAH) to recall a drug that’s used in the execution of prisoners.

But Sister Helen Prejean isn’t likely to be pleased with the response from the Dublin, Ohio-based pharmaceuticals distributor. A Cardinal spokeswoman was asked multiple times whether the company would yield to the nun’s wishes and she wouldn’t directly answer the question. Instead, she repeated the following statement:

As a distributor, our role in the healthcare supply chain is to ensure the safe and efficient delivery of products from manufacturers to customers holding the appropriate federal and state licenses. We do not play a part in the determination made by prescribing physicians, legislators, or regulators regarding the use of the products we distribute.

Sorry, Helen. The spokeswoman said that the statement above was essentially the message that Cardinal CEO George Barrett sent to Prejean in a letter the company faxed and mailed to her earlier today.

In Prejean’s letter, she asked that Cardinal recall the drug Nembutal, also known as pentobarbital, in one specific death penalty case involving a Georgia prisoner.

“Two of Cardinal Health’s core values are its commitment to acting in the best interests of the patient and improving patient safety,” Prejean wrote.  “The sale of Nembutal for use in executions appears to violate both the letter and spirit of [Cardinal's] code of ethics and your standards of business conduct.”

Before that she wasted little time in getting to her point, writing in the letter’s second sentence: “This sale was not for the purpose of  ’improving people’s lives’ as you say on your website, but to kill people, i.e., persons sentenced to death.”

Ouch. Probably not the kind of publicity Cardinal’s looking for, and no doubt a subject it’d rather avoid — but it’ll likely be forgotten soon enough.

“Dead Man Walking” was released in 1995, grossed $39 million in the U.S. and starred Sean Penn as a convicted killer who was executed and Susan Sarandon as the character based on Prejean.  Sarandon won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for portraying Prejean. The movie was based on a book by Prejean.

It featured the following line from Penn’s character that Prejean would likely agree with: “I just wanna say I think killin’ is wrong, no matter who does it, whether it’s me or y’all or your government.”