GlaxoSmithKline’s $500 million portfolio with Avalon Ventures invested in its in first startup – Palo Alto-based Sitari Pharmaceuticals.
According to Fierce Biotech, the San Diego-based venture group and its partners at GSK are funding Sitari with $10 million in cash and research support, with the R&D assist coming from the pharma giant.
The HCIL’s ongoing work with temporal event records has produced powerful tools for analyzing and exploring patterns of point-based events (Lifelines2, LifeFlow). However, users found that point-based events limited their capacity to solve problems that had inherently interval attributes, for example, the 3-month interval during which patients took a medication. To address this issue, EventFlow extends its predecessors to support both point-based and interval-based events. Interval-based events represent a fundamental increase in complexity at every level of the application, from the input and data structure to the eventual questions that a user might ask of the data. Our goal was to accomplish this integration in a way that appeared to users as a simple and intuitive extension of the original LifeFlow tool. With EventFlow, we present novel solutions for displaying interval events, simplifying their visual impact, and incorporating them into meaningful queries.
Open innovation is not new, but it is relatively new to health care, igniting a broad cross-section of challenges, hackathons, and competitions that seek to identify breakthrough solutions to solve for our health and our health care. By applying the best practices of the leading tech accelerators, these programs accelerate the speed at which new solutions are developed, companies are formed, and jobs are created.
To quote Todd Park, CTO of the United States of America, “There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur at the intersection of health care and IT.” And there has never been a better time, or industry, for open innovation, a game where no one loses. Open innovation is good for the sponsoring organization, good for the innovator, good for the patient, and good for America.
It’s more than likely that the readers of the NPQ Newswire may not be all that heavily involved in scientific research, but for those who are, the impact of federal budget cuts on agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies supporting scientific research have been devastating. For example, in fiscal 2013, the NIH had its budget cut (per sequestration) by 5 percent, roughly $1.5 billion, which meant that 640 research grants were not issued. As this Mediaite table shows, the NIH may be the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, but its appropriations have plummeted from over $31 billion in 2010 to a projected $27 billion in 2014:
Imagine a website launched by students, for students to share information about their innovation ecosystem on campus. I’m talking a navigation tool of sorts that allows students from every corner of the country to learn about what effective strategies universities have developed to enhance resources for students interested in exploring the technology and entrepreneurship realms. No, this isn’t a dream. This website exists, and it goes by the name of “University Innovation.”
The wiki was initially created by the University Innovation Fellows, an elite group of 45 students that are a part of a national movement to catalyze innovation on campus. But they’ve now opened up the wiki for the whole world to enjoy as a “resource to all student stakeholders in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship spheres in higher education.”
Several pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Merck (NYSE: MRK) , and Bayer (NYSE: have been taking steps to infuse their pipelines with new drug drugs by developing incubators to identify life science innovations that fit in with their longterm goals. Now Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) is collaborating with a biotech incubator backed by early stage life science and healthcare investor Versant Ventures, according to a company statement.
Many of today’s biotech companies don’t aspire to be companies at all. They’re more like temporary “virtual” projects, with skeleton crews of contractors who come together for a spell and then move on to the next thing. As others have observed, it’s much like what actors, directors and producers do to make movies in Hollywood.
That’s not how the enduring, independent biotech companies do it. These companies aspire to be bigger than any one individual, or any one product bound to lose patent protection in a few years. That means they need to do an old-fashioned thing—hire lots of smart people, give them good salaries and benefits, and challenge them to accomplish big things. Otherwise, there’s no way to carry out a long-term, lofty mission of creating valuable new products for patients.
A new business accelerator in Howard County has launched a crowdfunding campaign to get off the ground.
Conscious Venture Lab in Columbia is looking to raise $50,000 through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo, which allows users to set fundraising goals and generate donations from online supporters. The Howard County Economic Development Authority and the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship, part of the development authority, will match the money Conscious Venture Lab raises through its crowdfunding campaign.
The head of Maryland’s university system on Wednesday said higher education needs to embrace disruptive technologies such as massive online courses in an effort to serve more students and contain costs.
“If at the end of the day this means there aren’t as many universities or some people don’t have jobs, you know, this is not a welfare business,” William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual meeting. “We have the interests of the nation at stake.”
With the cost of drug development hitting the $5 billion mark and 94 percent of drugs failing at some point in clinical development, pharmaceutical companies have been turning to new tools to help clinical trial design: computers and robots.
A couple of Wall Street Journal articles highlight this trend.
One notes that in June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency endorsed a simulator from the Critical Path Institute to help develop Alzheimer’s disease treatments. Additional simulators are in the works for tuberculosis, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
