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Tools for Good Health

Hitting a Nerve

AxoGen is working on using donor nerve bundles to accelerate nerve regeneration in patients.

Most state-of-the-art repair methods of nerve injuries today use nerves from the victim's own body in a technique called autograft. Gainesville's AxoGen, a 3-year-old company that has licensed technology from the University of Florida's McKnight Brain Institute, is working on a new generation of nerve graft technology that instead uses human tissue grafts from donors. The idea is to process the tissue to produce a sterile graft that enables regeneration more quickly over large areas without damaging nerves from the patient's own body. The product should be launched in 12 to 16 months, says John P. Engels, an AxoGen director and head of the company's business development.


Product: Intellifill i.v.
Maker: ForHealth Technologies, Daytona Beach
Market: Large hospitals

A Dose of Medicine

Preparing IV syringes takes time, but a Daytona Beach company has found a way to automatically fill 600 small-dose syringes an hour -- and put a bar code on the medication that can be matched to a bar code at the patient's bedside. ForHealth Technologies, which moved from Oklahoma to Florida in 2002, has sold 13 of its $700,000 Intellifill i.v. machines to well-known health facilities, including the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Yale-New Haven Hospital. One Florida hospital, Leesburg Regional Medical Center, has the product in place, and both Miami Children's Hospital and Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine have them on order. ForHealth CEO G. Rodney Wolford says the company is working on growing U.S. sales, expanding to foreign markets, particularly Europe, and developing products that can be used for chemotherapy and large-dose IV syringes.