Canon owns a 15-per-cent stake in Redlen and is looking to increase the proportion of its revenues that come from medical equipment.A Victoria-area company that is poised to transform the medical imaging business is being bought out by Canon Inc.,Redlen Technologies Inc. makes high-resolution X-ray imaging technology using cadmium zinc telluride , a chemical compound that can be employed to measure the energy of individual light particles and translate the readout into electrical signals.
“Innumerable people will have a much better medical outcome with this new CT technology,” Mr. Bindley said. He added that Redlen, with 34 granted and pending patents, considered going public before choosing to sell to Canon. “They have world-class expertise in areas of automation and precision manufacturing that we don’t have, and can help us accelerate there.”
Redlen was founded in 1999, in a garage, by former Teck Cominco metallurgists Bob Redden and Brian Lent. The company’s technology is based on CZT crystal growth work they had done for the Canadian Space Agency. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, was an early strategic investor and customer, because Redlen’s technology was being used in dirty bomb detectors at border crossings. But the goal was always to develop next-generation medical imaging machines, Mr.