How many types of cells are there in the human body? Textbooks say a couple of hundred. But the true number is undoubtedly far larger.
Piece by piece, a new, more detailed catalogue of cell types is emerging from labs like that of Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which are applying recent advances in single-cell genomics to study individual cells at a speed and scale previously unthinkable.
A lot of people make news in the biopharma business. Few of them are influential.
Influence, simply put, is the ability to make your mark in such a way as to get other prominent people in this business to rethink the way they do business. Last year, that definition caused us to put GlaxoSmithKline’s ($GSK) Deirdre Connelly on the list for her plan to do away with sales quotas in the U.S. The influential idea then was that ethics had to come before numbers–a big issue at a company that has been challenged time and again by an unethical approach to business that spurred a series of sordid messes and a second take at a painful reorganization.
A U.K. government-appointed review team into the issue of antibiotic resistance, headed by economist Jim O’Neill, has urged the global pharmaceutical industry to fund a $2 billion innovation fund to kick-start research into new antibiotics. O’Neill argues that without the fund, the incentive for major pharmaceuticals to develop new antibiotics is not there. This is due to the low return-on-investment and too great a focus on short-term profit-and-loss. The issue of “who pays for new antibiotics?” was recently posed by Magnus Steigedal, director of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Strategic Research Area on Health, who came to a similar conclusion that the world cannot wait around for big pharma alone.
Like almost everyone else, doctors and nurses now use smartphones on a regular basis. So what’s the best way for the healthcare industry to take advantage of that?
That was the theme of many of the projects being developed in this year’s DreamIt Health Baltimore program, an intensive four-month bootcamp for health-tech startups that began in January. For the second year in a row, Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine co-sponsored the accelerator program in Baltimore, with the six startups setting up shop at an Inner Harbor work space.
The 21st Century Cures bill advanced Thursday when The House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee sent the unanimously passed bill onto the full committee, which will address it next week.
The bill could potentially be enacted into law later this year.
Drug costs are astronomical – this we know.
But we don’t have a transparent, informed way of calculating – or understanding – the true costs of drug development, argued Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor of pharmacoeconomics at Harvard University, in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Awful patient experience, poor communication, increasing out-of-pocket costs. Investors assembled for a panel discussion of the future of investing in aging technology at the AARP Innovation@50+ focused more on pain points that could apply to healthcare generally not specifically to senior care.
Jody Holtzman, senior vice president of thought leadership at the AARP, moderated the panel.
In just three months, demand for lab and office space at the Johns Hopkins innovation hub, FastForward East, has exceeded supply. The FastForward program, designed to move academic findings through translational research into the commercial marketplace, was introduced to East Baltimore earlier this year in an interim facility in the Rangos Building at 855 N. Wolfe St. In that time, all of its offices and lab benches have been rented.
Currently, preparations are being made to expand FastForward East from 6,000 square feet to 25,000 square feet of office and lab space. This facility will be a part of a new seven-level, $65.6 million laboratory and office building development, 1812 Ashland.
WHO’S GETTING FUNDED
Sickweather sold $95,000 in debt out of $250,000 offered, according to an SEC filing. The company makes an illness-tracking app, and recently released an Apple Watch version.
CyberSpa sold $350,000 in equity, according to an SEC filing. The downtown company makes technology that provides technical support on Windows PCs.
Emergent BioSolutions announced that a new phase I study has begun at the University of Oxford that will evaluate the use of its modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate as a prime boost to GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK – Analyst Report) Chimp Adenovirus type 3 Ebola vaccine candidate.
The study will enroll 38 volunteers and be conducted in the UK and is being supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department for International Development. Emergent BioSolutions manufactured the supply of MVA Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate to be used in this phase I study.
