Hospitals

MRIs (and Cleveland) win big in the latest round of Ohio Third Frontier funding

A $10 million public-private deal with Cardinal Health and Ohio State was the largest of several Third Frontier grants for biomedical companies or organizations announced Wednesday. Altogether, imaging companies and organizations received $20 million in funding. Out of eight total grant announcement, Cleveland-area companies were involved in five.

By Chris Seper on April 29, 2009

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio’s technology development project, Third Frontier, has announced a $10 million public-private partnership between Ohio State University and Cardinal Health.

It was one of a series of awards that also will provide grants worth another $23.4 million to about a dozen other Ohio health-care companies and organizations – with recipients coming largely from Greater Cleveland.

The $10 million announcement links Cardinal and Ohio State’s Wright Center of Innovation in Biomedical Imaging. The two organizations will launch a Molecular Imaging Technology Center that will house OSU and Cardinal researchers, and Cardinal’s radiopharmaceutical manufacturing facility and its nuclear pharmacy operations.

The partnership also would create a distinguished faculty position at OSU in radiopharmaceutical chemistry.

Much of the partnership’s research will focus on creating molecular imaging agents, which are injected into the body and are scanned to detect the earliest stages of multiple sclerosis, strokes and cancer. Columbus Business First noted that the Wright center’s imaging department uses a 7-Tesla magnet, which “allows for rapid, clear scans that show internal organs and reduce the need for exploratory surgery.”

Through the partnership, researchers want to develop the first-ever 8-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, according to the Business First.

Medical imaging won a significant amount of money from Third Frontier in the recent round. Aside from the Cardinal announcement, the state also awarded two $5 million grants to advance MRI technologies.

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Most of the Third Frontier grants went to Cleveland-area organizations, including the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Case Western Reserve University. The Clinic — along with Simbionix USA Corp. and Astro Medical Devices, two other Cleveland-area firms — will receive $3.4 million to develop products that help surgeons better implant shoulder, hip and knee joint replacements.

CWRU, meanwhile, received $5 million for a project it’s working on with Athersys Inc., the Cleveland Clinic and AcelleRx Therapeutics to continue work at the Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine in Cleveland.

Altogether, the Cleveland Clinic was affiliated with $13.3  million in Third Frontier funding.

“Imaging is now emerging as an important sector for the state,” said Tony Dennis, president and chief executive of BioOhio, the state’s bioscience company development organization.

Dennis, who sat in on part of the selection process, said Ohio is continuing to favor commercialization — taking research products and services to market — and to focus on the state’s medical strengths. Third Frontier also funded two stem-cell projects, Dennis said.

Other grants include:

  • Cleveland’s Arteriocyte will receive $4.9 million to develop its stem-cell therapies. The funding will be used in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio State University and University of Toledo.
  • ViewRay, based in the Cleveland suburb of Oakwood Village, will receive $5 million to work with Quality Electrodynamics, Ohio State and CWRU to better target radiation to cancerous cells using MRI.
  • ChanTest Corp. in Garfield Heights and Analiza Inc. in Cleveland will receive $4.8 million to expand their services to accelerate drug discovery. ChanTest is a contract research organization that works with both pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
  • Columbus-based Hyper Tech Research Inc. will receive $5 million to create a develop wire to be part of a new kind of full-body MRI system. Hyper Tech will work with Ohio State, the Wright Center of Innovation in Biomedical Imaging, RevWires, and Siemens Magnet Technology Ltd. to develop its high-field and high-temperature superconductor wire technology. The new full-body MRI would operate at higher temperatures and will not require the use of liquid helium bath to cool it.
  • Cleveland-based ACME Express Inc. received $349,900 for a project that uses its software to reduce health-care costs in Ohio by $35 million per year. The software manages medical staff scheduling, mainly for anesthesia, radiology, cardiology and emergency departments. ACME Express will use the state funding to expand and upgrade the software.