GE Healthcare officials made several announcements Wednesday in New York concerning the company’s $6 billion Healthymagination initiative, which aims at investing in technologies that improve healthcare.
Officials announced a $250 million equity fund to invest in healthcare technology companies that focus on three broad areas:
* Broad-based diagnostics, including imaging, home health, patient monitoring, molecular diagnostics, pathology, novel imaging agents and other technologies for disease diagnosis.
* Healthcare information technology, including electronic medical records, clinical information systems, healthcare information exchanges and value-added data services.
* Life sciences, including tools for research and development in biopharmaceuticals and stem cells and technologies for manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals and vaccines.
Officials say the fund will draw on capabilities from GE Healthcare, GE Capital and GE Global Research and have a global footprint.
"The creation of the GE Healthymagination Fund reaffirms our commitment to innovation in healthcare to bring better health to more people," GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt said. "As GE works on solutions to healthcare`s biggest challenges, it is vitally important that we support the development of companies with promising technologies or business models that are aligned with our strategy and have the potential to shape the future of healthcare. This includes smarter processes and technologies that measurably increase access to healthcare, reduce the cost of delivery and improve quality. The Healthymagination Fund gives us an opportunity to work with emerging companies to support their development, as well as provide them access to our technology base and our global presence."
GE officials also announced that the company was purchasing certain assets of ONI Medical Systems, Inc., a provider of magnetic resonance imaging services headquartered in Wilmington, Mass. Financial terms were not disclosed.
"One of the cornerstones of GE's Healthymagination vision is to develop and invest in technologies that increase quality, improve access and decrease costs. In line with this vision, the addition of ONI's products enhances our magnetic resonance business," said Jim Davis, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare's global MR business. "It gives us an opportunity to explore technologies that will increase patient access for claustrophobic patients, products with a smaller footprint and premium image quality, and specialty systems that provide advanced, cost-effective MR patient imaging."
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GE also presented the outcome of its cancer research with Eli Lilly and Company, which resulted in the development of a tissue-based biomarker technology that for the first time can simultaneously map more than 25 proteins in tumors at the sub-cellular level.
"In cancer treatment, information is one of the most powerful tools that a doctor has at his disposal," said Richard Gaynor, vice president of cancer research and clinical investigation for Lilly Research Laboratories. "By identifying multiple biomarkers on a cell by cell basis, physicians will be able to make more informed choices on therapies to prescribe, as well as therapies to avoid, based on a patient's specific type of cancer."
Officials said the new technology has been tested successfully on colon and prostate cancer tissue samples and is believed to be applicable to all types of cancer.
GE and Lilly representatives also announced plans to extend their research agreement to include the study of four Lilly oncology molecules that are currently in the company's development pipeline. While the technology is expected to help in the analysis of all cancers, they said, the two companies will perform specific investigations in breast, ovarian, lung and possibly gastric cancers.
