NEW ORLEANS, LA - Gamma Medica-Ideas and GE Healthcare announced 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 products 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.

"Researchers across the globe will reap the benefits of the combined multi-modality pre-clinical portfolio of GE Healthcare and Gamma Medica-Ideas accelerating studies to investigate disease biology and develop new drugs," said James Mitchell, general manager, molecular imaging technologies, GE Healthcare. "This agreement makes for a one-stop-shop for pre-clinical imaging devices."

ABOUT GAMMA MEDICA-IDEAS, INC.

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