The HIMSS Innovation Center opens today in Cleveland, a city, known around the world for the Cleveland Clinic and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and one that prides itself on being a city of firsts.
HIMSS leaders who describe their 50,000-plus member organization of health IT professionals as “cause-based,” make no bones about their intent to shake things up in healthcare – more than a little bit.
British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline will seek marketing approval for the world’s first malaria vaccine next year after trial data showed the shot significantly cut cases of the disease in African children.
The vaccine known as RTS,S was found, after 18 months of follow-up, to have almost halved the number of malaria cases in young children in the trial, and to have reduced by around a quarter the number of malaria cases in infants.
“Based on these data, GSK now intends to submit, in 2014, a regulatory application to the European Medicines Agency (EMA),” GSK, which has been developing the vaccine for three decades, said in a statement.
Kids today … are actually doing some amazing stuff. Take 15-year-old Jack Andraka, who recently won the grand prize of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for developing an early detection test for pancreatic cancer.
Andraka came up with the idea for the test after a close family friend died of pancreatic cancer. Using free online science papers, he formed a basis for the test, which looks for increased levels of a biomarker for pancreatic cancer in blood and urine. He contacted 197 scientists, seeking help with his research, and was rejected by each one, before Dr. Anirban Maitra at Johns Hopkins University agreed to donate lab space and help him develop his research.
(Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Bicoastal venture firm New Enterprise Associates owns 75.2 percent of GlycoMimetics Inc., making NEA by far the biggest beneficiary of the Gaithersburg biotech’s planned initial public offering.
The company revealed NEA’s outsized ownership in its IPO paperwork, filed on Friday. It is not yet clear whether the firm, which has a major office in Chevy Chase, plans to sell some of its 26.7 million shares in the offering.
MacroGenics Inc. is slated to go public this week.
The Rockville drug-maker plans to raise as much as $73.6 million to fund the development of its pipeline, selling 4 million shares at a forecasted range of $14 to $16 per share. Shares of MGNX are expect to start trading Friday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Noble Life Sciences (Gaithersburg, MD), in collaboration with ImQuest BioSciences (Frederick, MD), has successfully developed a neutropenic mouse thigh model of infection and demonstrated its use in a study evaluating vancomycin for the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus infection. The model will serve as a new Noble service for the evaluation of the efficacy of novel anti-microbial compounds in the treatment of microbial infections.
Complicated skin and soft tissue infections are frequently encountered in clinical practice and are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in hospitalized patients. The neutropenic mouse thigh model of infection has been used extensively to test and benchmark antimicrobial drugs leading to a significant impact on our current knowledge of antimicrobial pharmacology. This model allows the quantitative comparison of different agents and different dosing regimes and the determination of the time-course of antimicrobial activity under conditions optimal for efficacy, i.e., neutropenia.
Donald E. Ingber, a professor at Harvard University, has combined advanced electronics and biology to create a “lung on a chip,” a breakthrough device that could safely allow precise tests of risky new medical treatments before they are tried out on humans.
Just as eye-opening as his work, however, may be his source of federal financing.
It’s not the National Institutes of Health, the $30-billion agency that is the largest provider of federal basic-research money to universities. Instead it’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, an agency one-tenth as large as NIH and responsible primarily for meeting the military’s technological needs.
GlycoMimetics, Inc. announced today that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the proposed initial public offering of shares of its common stock. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. GlycoMimetics has applied to list its common stock on the NASDAQ Global Market under the ticker symbol “GLYC.”
Jefferies LLC and Barclays Capital Inc. are acting as joint book-running managers for the proposed offering. Stifel is acting as co-lead manager and Canaccord Genuity Inc. is acting as co-manager.
The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. When available, copies of the preliminary prospectus relating to the offering may be obtained from Jefferies LLC, Equity Syndicate Prospectus Department, 520 Madison Avenue, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10022, by email at Prospectus_Department@Jefferies.com or by phone at 877-547-6340 or Barclays Capital Inc., c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, by email at Barclaysprospectus@broadridge.com or by phone at 888-603-5847.
Even people without diabetes could be at higher risk of dying from disease
High blood sugar has been linked to a greater risk of dying from several types of cancer, a potentially worrying finding for countries with growing rates of obesity.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, USA and Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea made the discovery by following more than 1.2 million Koreans for 10 years.
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.
