BioMarker Strategies announced the appointment of Jerry Parrott as President, Chief Executive Officer and Director, effective immediately.
According to a release, Parrott will report to the Company’s Board of Directors, which will continue to be led by Chairman Jack Davis, a co-founder and former Chairman and CEO of Dianon Systems.
Fyodor, a Baltimore-based biotechnology company, announced today that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the company a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 grant. The $729,000 funding will help accelerate Fyodor’s effort to develop and validate a noninvasive multi-disease urine-based diagnostic test for Acute Febrile Illness (AFI), enabling the differential clinical diagnosis of leading global health diseases like malaria, typhoid, dengue, and leptospirosis from a single urine specimen in patients with fever.
Berlin, Germany, and U.S.A. – Epigenomics AG (Frankfurt Prime Standard: ECX, OTC: EPGNY), the German-American cancer molecular diagnostics company, announced today that it has entered into a joint commercialization agreement with Polymedco Inc., a leading provider of colorectal cancer tests in North America. Both companies will jointly commercialize Epi proColon®, Epigenomics’ blood-based test for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening, in North America.
Chevy Chase-based New Enterprise Associates has joined in a $10 million financing for Cydan LLC, a Cambridge, Mass.-based orphan drug accelerator.
The additional funding comes months after the project’s launch in April, and brings its total financing to $26 million. Lundbeckfond Ventures and Bay City Capital led the most recent financing.
A veteran biotechnology reporter once complained privately that covering the industry was like watching grass grow—companies seemed to inch by slow degrees toward products and profits, sustained by a dwindling stream of funding.
For an antidote to that dreary picture, consider the swift developments at StartX Med, a life sciences accelerator program founded by Stanford University students in 2012. It’s a health care-oriented offshoot of StartX, the original student-initiated incubator program for researchers and others affiliated with Stanford.
BIO’s announced agreement with National Science Foundation (NSF) to bring SBIR-funded, early-stage biotech companies to present at BIO Investor Forum 2013. Presenting companies in NSF track include ADMdx, Biodesy, Carmot, CertiChem, Jade Therapeutics, Nano3D Biosciences, Nanofiber Solutions, Parabon Nanolabs, Stemina, and Tymora Analytical Operations. All are funded by NSF and focused on drug discovery, diagnostics, and other platform technologies.
As health systems and hospitals consolidate and battle for patients, they are starting to employ online consumer marketing efforts. A new Provider Web Presence Index is now available to track the success of providers.
Payer+Provider Syndicate has created the Provider Web Presence Index, which was released Tuesday, and evaluates the quality of the web presence of hospitals compared with competitors. The tool is based on a single indicator, which incorporates measures of web traffic, inbound linking and site relevance.
When Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Intuitive Surgical hit the market in 1999 with its surgical robot, da Vinci, the company and many of its early adopters hailed the new technology as a revolution that would benefit patients, surgeons and the health care system as a whole. Da Vinci combines high-definition visual tools with robot-guided medical instruments that allow surgeons to do complicated procedures using a few tiny incisions. The da Vinci system, which is widely used in urologic surgeries such as the removal of prostate tumors, has been shown by Intuitive and outside researchers to reduce post-surgery complications and shorten hospital stays.
Two days into a government shutdown over resulting from the Congressional showdown over funding Obamacare, funding is at the front of mind for many researchers who rely at least partially on grants from National Institutes of Health and other government sources. A survey of 608 translational researchers revealed that although insufficient funding is a significant barrier to the path to commercializing their work, there are other related challenges that are just as critical to their future.
How can translational researchers improve the rate of reproducible results? What other factors are undercutting funding? Where can they find collaboration opportunities?
