NinePoint Medical, Inc., an emerging leader in the development of in vivo pathology devices, today announced it has been awarded a grant of approximately $250,000 from the Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Project (QTDP) Program. The QTDP's grants and tax credits are provided under the new section 48D of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), enacted as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.
"As a medical device company, we are very proud to receive this recognition from the QTDP and will utilize the award as we further our mission to develop and commercialize breakthrough products that enable real-time decision making and streamline patient care," said Charles Carignan, M.D., president and chief executive officer of NinePoint Medical. "We believe this acknowledgement underscores our unique potential to significantly improve upon the access, diagnosis and treatment paradigm used in the examination of dysplastic and cancerous cells and advance patient care. We have a number of important milestones upcoming over the next 12 months and look forward to deploying this grant to support our clinical and corporate strategies."
NinePoint's initial focus will be on developing devices for the examination of the gastrointestinal tract. The devices are designed to allow gastroenterologists and offsite pathologists to review advanced tissue images during biopsies and other therapeutic and diagnostic procedures in real time. This capability would potentially provide physicians with immediately actionable information and eventually, the ability to treat the questionable cells at the time of diagnosis. By streamlining the timeline and the steps required to go from diagnosis to treatment, NinePoint believes it can significantly improve patient experiences and outcomes, improve the efficiency of care and provide important savings to the healthcare system. Over time, the company believes that the technology will have broad applicability across a number of diagnostic and therapeutic categories.