News Archive

AstraZeneca and Taiwan’s National Research Program for Biopharmaceuticals (NRPB) today announced a collaborative program to support academic research proposals using open innovation as a catalyst for drug discovery. The program will connect expert physicians and scientists with a wide range of high-quality, small molecule compounds and biologics developed by AstraZeneca.  

Successful research proposals submitted from academic institutes in Taiwan will be funded by the NRPB to explore new therapeutic uses for specific AstraZeneca compounds which may in turn lead to the development of novel therapies for patients. Further financial details were not disclosed. Areas of high interest include cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, inflammation, autoimmune, oncology, infection and neuroscience diseases.

Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens plans to give Johns Hopkins University $20 million to help spur potentially vision-saving research at the school’s Wilmer Eye Institute.

The gift will be included in the 85-year-old’s estate and will create an endowment to fund a T. Boone Pickens Scholars program supporting scientists.

Each year, a committee of Cleveland Clinic doctors asks hundreds of their colleagues to weigh in on which emerging healthcare technologies they think will help shape their practice over the next 12 months.

Then, the committee evaluates nominations based on clinical impact, probability of commercial success, progress in commercialization and significant human interest, and produces a top 10 list announced at the end of the Clinic’s annual Medical Innovations Summit.

Biocrossroads, which provides money and support to Indiana’s life sciences industry, announced the seven finalists who stand to gain startup funding in its annual New Venture Competition. Six have biotech or healthcare in their sights. On Oct. 21, five of these companies will compete for $25,000 and access to the Indiana Seed II Fund‘s staff and network for early-stage business support at the Indiana Life Sciences Summit. Second and third place in this competition will rake in $15,000 and $10,000 respectively.

“The New Venture Competition has proven to be a great way for us to find and reward promising companies, and is an excellent opportunity for the competingcompanies to gain some exposure within Indiana’s life sciences community,’ David Johnson, president and CEO of BioCrossroads, said in a release.

StartUp Health, a New York-based incubator for health technology startups, admitted 14 new companies into its three-year development program this week. The program, which received 1,200 applications in the past year, aims to give new medical companies long-term mentoring and access to capital.

The new entrants include companies working on medication adherence, remote medical services and patient engagement in physical therapy. Cohero Health, a one-year-old company based in New York, aims to help kids with chronic asthma manage their condition.

Your liver could be “eating” your brain, new research suggests.

People with extra abdominal fat are three times more likely than lean individuals to develop memory loss and dementia later in life, and now scientists say they may know why.

“When I was a young entrepreneur, board meetings were by far the worst days of my life,” says Jeff Bonforte, the veteran company-builder who just sold his latest, Xobni, to Yahoo. “Board meetings are the height of insecurity for a CEO. Basically it’s a group of people who can both judge you and fire you based on that judgment.” 

He’s had his fair share of bad experiences. At his first company, iDrive, he’d find himself every quarter standing in front of the room, sweating bullets, struggling to get through his meticulously-prepared slides. “It was a mess,” he says. “They’d just sit there and tell me how insufficient I was, how I needed to bring in someone more senior, or smarter. Then it just hit me. I don’t need this. I don’t need people to attack me for four straight hours. I need people who can help me.” 

Under Armour Inc. is hunting for the techies that can help the company beef up its fitness tracking device known as Armour39.

Armour39, a digital performance monitor launched in March, tracks an individual’s heart rate, calories burned and workout intensity, and provides a “WILLpower” score that reflects how hard an individual trained during a workout.

MedImmune’s venture arm has jumped in to lead a $12.5 million round for a Chapel Hill, NC-based startup that is working on a new drug to treat a common ailment spurred by chemotherapy. G1 Therapeutics, which was initially seeded by Hatteras Venture Partners to the tune of $600,000, says that the new funds will finance its IND work and point the company to proof-of-concept data on a drug designed to protect against myelosuppression–the loss of blood cells–during chemo. Hatteras Venture Partners and Mountain Group Capital contributed to the round.

G1 was founded on the work of Norman Sharpless at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Kwok-Kin Wong at Harvard Medical School. They concluded that a cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 inhibitor could play a big role in protecting the bone marrow of chemo patients.

QIAGEN N.V. (frankfurt prime standard:QIA) today announced the Empowered Genome Community, which is a first-of-its-kind initiative to help people who have had their genomes sequenced share, explore, and interpret their data with researchers and each other. To highlight how the community can spark new biomedical insight, QIAGEN also released an open collaborative analysis of myopia in 111 people whose genomes were sequenced through Harvard’s Personal Genome Project (PGP), which is a public repository of well-phenotyped human genomes. Anyone – citizen scientist or full-time researcher alike – can directly review and help refine the analysis via QIAGEN’s Ingenuity® Variant Analysis(TM) (https://variants.ingenuity.com/community-myopia) with the goal of jointly publishing robust insights on myopia next year.