The science and technology award winners are:
Accumed Systems, an Ann Arbor medical supplier, was founded by one of the world’s leading interventional cardiologists — Dr. William O’Neill, director of cardiology at William Beaumont Hospital of Royal Oak — to develop and commercialize innovative medical tools. Accumed provides devices that simplify medical procedures, increase patient comfort and save clinician time. Currently, the company markets two types of devices – intra-luminal measuring devices and trans-radial catheterization accessories. The company commercializes its products through regional distributors and multi-national companies specializing in medical devices. Supported by an investment from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Accumed has launched an aggressive program to develop a system for detecting vulnerable plaque. The technology being developed employs a catheter and measures temperature variations within the cardiac vasculature. Elevated temperature has been shown to exist in lesions that pose a potential risk of acute myocardial infarction. www.accumedsystemsinc.com
Acro Service Corp. of Livonia supplies the XRM Solutions workforce management program that streamlines the process of procuring, administering and paying for contingent employees from various staffing agencies. Started in 1982 as a privately-held staffing firm servicing clients in the Detroit area, Acro provides a Web-based service – Acro’s XRM Solutions – that manages nearly $1 billion in transactions for more than 15 clients while reducing costs and hiring time and improving the quality of new hires. Acro’s business and sales professionals are tuned in to contract services procurement industry developments by tracking customer feedback and monitoring regulatory changes. “Within the information technology space, we expect to see major developments on the user interaction features of business applications using some of the lessons we’ve learned from the consumer space such as social media, use of video clips and other graphic intensive files, privacy, security, mobility, and more,” said Ron Shahani, Acro’s CEO. “These developments will ensure that business users have secure and on-demand access to content rich information about their customers, partners, suppliers, transactions and history to make more informed decisions. This will help for-profit or nonprofit organizations to dramatically innovate their customer service.” www.acrocorp.com
AFID Therapeutics of Lansing is a privately-owned corporation that produces advanced chemical and biochemical technologies used for new drug development. The company has an extensive number of synthetic chemistry patents and the expertise to prepare very advanced small molecule drugs and new advanced materials for use in their delivery to patients. In particular, it is investigating anti-microbial and anti-coagulation treatments. AFID Therapeutics’s founder Rawle Hollingsworth developed one of the most extensive suites of general carbohydrate-based chemistries in use today. Starting from substituted pentose and hexose sugars, Hollingsworth discovered routes to large families of compounds that led to the development of advanced chemistries with a much broader stretch of applications. These developments are detailed in hundreds of publications and issued patents aimed at treating diseases such as bacterial and viral infections, cancer, autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disorders, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s and other neurological disorders. Drug targets include kinases, phosphatases, nucleases, glycosidases, glycosyltransferases, ribosomes, cell membranes and nucleic acids. www.afidtherapeutics.com