Health Robotics recently entered an agreement with 850-bed medical center St-Antonius Hospital [Utrecht and Nieuwegein, The Netherlands] according to which Health Robotics will provide 1 i.v.STATION Robot to the latter. Also, St-Antonius Hospital will provide Health Robotics with assistance in the protocol development for the complex and sterile compounding of Monoclonal Antibody (mAbs) therapy for i.v.STATION and i.v.STATION ONCO. The monoclonal antibody therapies are very complex and expensive biological drugs well known to display poor biophysical properties, such as low stability and propensity to aggregate.
"Integrating i.v.STATION at St-Antonius' clinical pharmacy operations provides a safe, accurate, and efficient way to compound mAbs, and additionally a very unique opportunity to reduce the waste of these very expensive biological medications. We are very excited about the mAbs project and look forward to jointly-develop this unique i.v.STATION functionality, and being the first scientists to provide proof of accurate and automated reconstitution of complex mAbs, such as Infliximab, Rituximab and Trastuzumab [1] "said Dr. Ewoudt van de Garde, Clinical Pharmacist-Epidemiologist, St-Antonius Hospital, in a statement.
"Although i.v.STATION has already compounded "live" mAbs for patients and fully-demonstrated its financial and clinical benefits, our focus so far has been on eliminating drug and diluent exchange errors while minimizing costs, drug quantity mistakes, and sterility risks. Now it is time to provide scientific evidence of the additional importance of drug efficacy and reduction of oncology drugs' patient side effects made possible through our exclusive Mechatronics [2] solutions and the protocol-development assistance from St-Antonius. These jointly-developed mAbs protocols will be made available to our global customer network," stated Gaspar DeViedma, Health Robotics' Executive Vice President.
Meanwhile, Health Robotics recently announced the successful implementation of i.v.STATION at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, with the opening of its new and state-of-the-art hospital facility, the Marion and John E. Anderson Pavilion. Children's Hospital Los Angeles is now the 6th i.v.STATION Robot operating in the United States of America, after Long Beach Memorial Hospital, Miller Children's Hospital, Brigham & Women's Hospital (2 Robots), and Allegiance Health.
Rahul Arora is a HealthTechZone contributor. He has worked as an editor and freelance writer for several reputed organizations in India. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Juliana Kenny
