Agreement strengthens both companies’ portfolios, gives customers greater access to pre-clinical imaging devices

New Orleans, LA June 16, 2008 –Gamma Medica-Ideas and GE Healthcare announced today at the 55th annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, that GE Healthcare will be the exclusive distributor of Gamma Medica-Ideas’ pre-clinical imaging productsglobally (excluding Japan) effective July 1, 2008.  Pre-Clinical imaging plays a key role in new pharmaceutical therapeutic development by allowing researchers to visualize the structure, function and response of laboratory animals in vivo.

The agreement complements GE Healthcare’s portfolio of pre-clinical products, and grants researchers greater access to GM-I’s innovative, fully-digital tri-modality Positron Emission Tomography (PET); Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) and Computed Tomography (CT) scanners. 

“This agreement is an opportunity for customers to gain greater access to our hybrid scanners by leveraging the extensive footprint of GE Healthcare,” said Bradley Patt, Ph.D., president and CEO of GM-I. “We were first to market a tri-modal pre-clinical scanner, and our all-digital technology provides improved spatial resolution, while enabling researchers to share images easily-bringing digital pathology to the pre-clinical arena.”

Gamma Medica-Ideas have installed more than 50 multi-modality systems on four continents since 2002. The company’s first-to-market all-digital technologies have made it a leader in pre-clinical imaging systems.

“GE Healthcare is excited to be working with Gamma Medica-Ideas,” said Gene Saragnese, vice president and general manager, molecular imaging and CT, GE Healthcare. “This agreement underscores our deep commitment to the molecular imaging and pre-clinical markets. Many innovations in clinical imaging get their start in the pre-clinical devices, and we continue to look to that space as a showcase for what’s possible for the future of human PET, SPECT and CT imaging.”

GE Healthcare already offers dual-modality PET/CT, CZT based SPECT/CT and dedicated in-vivo and specimen pre-clinical CT scanners. The agreement with GM-I brings scaleable and upgradeable tri-modal (PET/SPECT/CT) systems under the GE umbrella.

About Gamma Medica-Ideas, Inc.
Gamma Medica-Ideas (GM-I) designs, builds and services imaging systems based on novel technologies to improve patient health through early diagnosis of disease, improved patient treatment and by enabling new drug discovery. GM-I is dedicated to leading medical imaging into a new digital era with its unique sensor readout systems. The company’s core digital imaging technologies also hold great promise for a new class of solutions for the safety and security markets. In the pre-clinical space, GM-I’s FLEX Triumph™ imaging platform is marketed for medical research and drug development. The FLEX Triumph system combines PET (X-PET™ or its new fully digital LabPET™), SPECT (X-SPECT®) and CT (X-O™) modalities in the world’s first tri-modality system. In the clinical space, GM-I offers LumaGEM®, its dual-headed Molecular Breast Imaging (MBI) based system for early diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. The digital gamma ray imaging technology in LumaGEM offers significant advances in resolution and contrast which has allowed for identification of millimeter sized breast cancers missed by mammography, especially in women with dense breast tissue. Visit www.gm-ideas.com.

ABOUT GE HEALTHCARE:
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.
GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.

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