WARWICK – The Crowne Plaza Hotel at the Crossings announced recently that it is providing complimentary high-speed Internet connections in its guestrooms.

Through its service provider, Cox Business Services of Rhode Island, the hotel has installed cable modems in all of its 266 guestrooms, giving three-megabyte high-speed data access to all registered guests of the hotel.

“For the commercial traveler, the ability to connect both to their office and the worldwide Web via a high-speed link is the number one requested amenity of hotels today,” said J. Rudi Heater, director of hotel operations for Carpionato Properties – Hotel Division. “In order to drive guest loyalty in an ever-increasingly competitive hotel market, we elected to provide this 21st-century service on a complimentary basis.”

The Internet service will also be installed in the 104-guestroom addition announced for the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Construction will begin on these new guestrooms in the fall of 2003, with a projected opening of Jan. 1, 2005.

MultiCell Technologies awarded SBIR grant

WARWICK – MultiCell Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Exten Industries Inc., announced recently that it has been awarded another Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study new metabolic pathways for their proprietary immortalized human liver cells, used increasingly in pharmaceutical research and development to help identify new drug candidates to treat various diseases.

The aim of the SBIR award is to identify additional cellular metabolic functions that might be helpful in identifying viable chemical compounds for future drug development, thus augmenting current utilization of MultiCell’s cell lines.

MultiCell President and Chief Scientific Officer Ronald Faris, Ph.D., said, “MultiCell’s human hepatocyte cell lines have been proven useful in identifying potential drug-drug interactions before clinical trials are initiated.” Faris continued: “We have a handful of big pharma clients currently. This new grant will hopefully allow us to determine additional, as yet unidentified, metabolic pathways whereby chemical compounds can interact with human liver cells, thus providing our customers with even more model systems useful for identifying and evaluating new drug candidates in additional disease areas.”

Published 08/25/2003
Issue 18-19