Online health information company WebMD has snapped up Avado, a startup that develops cloud-based software to let physicians and patients interact.
The companies declined to disclose financial information, but said Avado’s technology will be integrated under the WebMD brand and that the founders will join the company to continue developing the technology and business relationships.
For $99, genetic testing startup 23andMe will analyze your DNA, telling you how to live smarter and longer–and what disease might kill you. But there’s another inner frontier to explore in personalized medicine: the bacteria in your gut.
For $89, Ubiome, a startup founded by Jessica Richman–a doctoral candidate at Oxford who did stints at Google and McKinsey after graduating from Stanford in 2009–will send you a kit that harvests the organisms that live inside your body. For additional fees, you can also gather bacteria from your mouth, nose, skin, and genitalia.
The typical university research park is 119 acres (just over 48 hectares), has seven buildings open and is located in a suburban jurisdiction with a population of 500,000 or less.
But urban-style live-work-play campuses are where they’re going, typified by Centennial Campus (affiliated with North Carolina State University), Mission Bay (affiliated with the University of California San Francisco) and the Fitzsimons Life Science District in Colorado (affiliated with the University of Colorado’s academic medical center).
Site Selection for Life Sciences Companies,” a report released this month by business intelligence firm Venture Valuation and KPMG, uses an agglomeration of other reports and proprietary data to analyze key decision factors relevant to the leading life sciences clusters in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK.
Why those territories? The authors say those countries are often preferred by foreign companies seeking European or global headquarters. But depending on which factors are emphasized and how they’re weighted, any of the six might stand above the rest.
GrayBug, LLC, a company that focuses on the development of innovative injectable drug delivery systems to more effectively treat eye diseases, has announced the appointment of Michael O’Rourke as President & CEO, as well as Board Member.
“I am excited to take on this leadership role at this pivotal point in GrayBug’s development,” said Mr. O’Rourke. “GrayBug has developed a unique approach to offer superior treatment options to patients through proprietary sustained release drug platforms. I look forward to working with the team at GrayBug to advance our lead product for the treatment of neovascular eye diseases including wet age-related macular degeneration (wet-AMD).”
To generate its list of the top 10 U.S. regions in which to secure a biotech job, GEN adopted a straightforward methodology. It identified the regions most frequently cited in biotechnology and pharmaceutical job listings. Over the past month, GEN collected data by scrutinizing five employment websites—LinkedIn, BioSpace, Medzilla, Indeed, and Monster.
The locales with the most biopharma-related jobs include the regular suspects—San Francisco and Boston—and also up and comers like the New York metropolitan area, which has grown steadily over the last few years.
BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) (NYSE:BDX), a leading global medical technology company, together with Direct Relief and the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), today launched BD Helping Build Healthy CommunitiesSM, a four-year initiative that will expand access and improve care for underserved and vulnerable populations in the U.S. The initiative, first announced earlier this year with a founding pledge at the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, includes a BD commitment of approximately $5 million in cash and product to clinics and community health centers (CCHCs) employing innovative models of care, along with strategic support from all
This is the start of the third year teaching teams of scientists (professors and their graduate students) in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps). This month we’ve crossed ~300 teams in the first two years through the program.
I-Corps is the accelerator that helps scientists bridge the commercialization gap between their research in their labs and wide-scale commercial adoption and use.
During his nine years working in the pharmaceutical industry, Michael Pollastri learned to protect his research and data with extreme caution. “In the drug industry, everything is super secret,” said Pollastri, now an associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern. “It’s the culture.”
But Pollastri said this secrecy model doesn’t work when it comes to curing infectious diseases such as African sleeping sickness and Chagas disease, which affect the poorest members of the global community but are largely “neglected” by the industry. What’s more, “there’s not enough money going around to spend time on projects in which no one is sharing information,” Pollastri said.
Gaithersburg-based GlycoMimetics Inc. set the terms for its upcoming IPO on Monday, planning to sell 4 million shares at between $14 and $16 apiece.
The biotech expects to list on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GLYC. It would be the third in an already active stretch for Maryland life sciences IPOs, following Intrexon Corp. and MacroGenics Inc. to the public markets.
