News Archive

A highly personalized medical technique is allowing patients with advanced kidney cancer to live nearly three times as long as they normally do. In an experiment involving 21 patients, around half lived more than two and half years after diagnosis with kidney cancer that had begun to spread. Five patients are alive after more than five years.

“That seems to be out of proportion with what you would expect for any commercial therapy and longer than what you would expect from patients with similar prognostic variables,” says Robert Figlin, an oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles, who is leading the study.

Upcoming Funding Opportunity Deadlines -NEW FORMS-C Required for SBIR/STTR applications

The next NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Omnibus deadline is only two months away on August 5, 2014, which means your small business should be preparing your application.

As the United States slowly emerges from the Great Recession, led by our cities and metropolitan areas, a remarkable shift is occurring in the spatial geography of innovation.

For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been epitomized by regions like Silicon Valley — suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing and recreation.

Senseonics, a privately held medical device company focused on the development and commercialization of the first fully implantable, long-term continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system, announced that it has raised an additional $20 million of private equity financing.  Senseonics also announced that Mirasol Panlilio, formerly of Abbott Diabetes Care and LifeScan, has joined the company as Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing.  

Current investors Anthem Capital, Delphi Ventures, Greenspring Associates, Healthcare Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and other strategic partners all participated in the financing round.  Senseonics intends to use the proceeds to continue its product development initiatives including completing pivotal trials in Europe, obtaining CE mark, and initiating IDE trials in the United States. “We’re very happy of the continued support from our investors as we near the completion of the product development efforts for our first generation long-term CGM system, “ said Tim Goodnow, CEO and President.  Senseonics has recently begun its European pivotal trials and expect to complete site initiation of all seven European sites before the end of summer.

PETER PRONOVOST: The biggest misperception is certainty. When you receive a diagnosis from a doctor, we don’t always know for 100% sure if it is correct. In reality, medicine is an inexact science. In 2012, Johns Hopkins researchers, including myself, found that in intensive-care units alone, diagnostic errors may account for as many deaths as breast cancer in the U.S.

This is part of a growing body of research highlighting the need to focus on diagnostic accuracy. We need to create health-care systems in which learning is incorporated into daily practice, so that physicians can receive feedback on the accuracy of their diagnoses. We can do this by standardizing care around best practices and standardizing data collection regarding clinicians’ diagnoses and the results they get: Health information technology makes this possible.

DATE: June 13, 2014, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

LOCATION: Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research, University of Maryland, in Rockville, MD

Emerging Strategies for the Production and Characterization of Biosimilars

The biomanufacturing industry faces an unprecedented challenge with the emergence of biosimilars.  The pathway to approval for biosimilars is a fluid process and several key aspects are still not determined.  The University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will deliver a one-day symposium on the current trends of characterization and production of biosimilars.  On Friday, June 13, 2014 at 8:30 am join the thought-leaders, policy-makers, and creators of biosimilars as we present current trends, ideas, and predictions.

In the translational medicine space — where medical research is “translated” into health tools and solutions for patients — the majority of engaged physicians are either biomedical researchers interested in advancing our understanding of the basic science, or are practicing doctors who want to improve clinical practice while focusing on patient care.

The number of physicians who receive training in understanding this translational research space is few, and even fewer are those who are able to take this skill set into the market to develop new technologies based off this understanding.

At Medgadget we speak with quite a few physicians-turned-entrepreneurs, and one of the most enthusiastic and impressive we’ve known is Dr. Amy Baxter. We first met Dr. Baxter at the AARP conference in Atlanta last October where she was showing off a simple, yet effective tool she developed for pain relief called “Buzzy.” There’s been a lot of, well, buzz about the device ever since she pitched it on Shark Tank and turned down the investors. Informed by her experiences as a pediatric emergency physician, Dr. Baxter took time out of her schedule to answer a few questions we had about the device and why she thinks everyone who experiences pain should have one.

Meet the humble “Magnetosperm,” a tiny, sperm-like robot with incredible potential in the medical world.

It’s approximately six times longer than a human sperm, and scientists at the American Institute of Physics say in a paper that Magnetosperm “technology could be used not only to help with fertilization, but also chemotherapy treatment.”

Disruptive change is now a fact of life for many industries. Healthcare is no exception. Although healthcare has been changing for decades—think about the introduction of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) or the initial push toward managed care in the 1980s—the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promises to accelerate both the rate of change and the level of uncertainty confronting the industry. Payors face navigating a difficult transition: from an industry in which the customer is often a corporation or small company and the business is paying claims to one in which consumers make healthcare purchasing decisions, the direct provision of care may be necessary for success, and consumer and retail capabilities really matter. Furthermore, payors must make this transition amid regulatory and consumer uncertainty and in a fairly short time frame. This industry and business-model shift is on a scale that few companies and few sectors in the economy have been through.