CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield has jumped head-first into the deep waters of mobile health. The health insurance giant has selected Cognizant, a mobile communication company, to provide a platform for getting mobile apps to its 3.3 million members.

Cognizant will help CareFirst offer its members “quick, secure and convenient ways” to manage their health coverage, access information about physicians and claims, and get information about benefits anytime, on any device, according to Cognizant officials in a news release.

Rockville-based Emergent BioSolutions Inc. on Friday announced the appointment of Barry Labinger, a well-known former executive at Human Genome Sciences Inc., to head its biosciences division.

Labinger served as HGS’ chief commercial officer from 2005 until last year, when GlaxoSmithKline plc snapped up the Rockville drug-maker for $3.6 billion. Glaxo made a clean sweep of Human Genome executives, including CEO Tom Watkins, shortly after.

Thursday, August 22, 2013 10:00 am

This webinar, hosted by GUIRR, will present a new resource, the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Available Technologies tool. The tool provides a free, one-stop shop to locate licensing opportunities for a particular technology anywhere within the FLC’s nationwide system of federal labs and research centers. Fully equipped with Google’s advanced search capabilities, the FLC Available Technologies tool yields user-friendly results that can be saved, printed, or downloaded as a PDF with active hyperlinks that directly link to the featured technology.

Industry and academic representatives who would like to find out more about how this tool can reduce the time, effort, and guesswork needed to find federal laboratory inventions available to transfer are encouraged to participate.

Through the Advanced Studies in Technology Transfer program, students will simultaneously gain the necessary knowledge and build professional networks with respected practitioners of the field. Our objective is to serve not only the needs of scientists and engineers who wish to pursue this non-traditional career, but also those of professionals who seek additional training.

View available courses in the Advanced Studies in Technology Transfer program.

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The relatively new field of Technology Transfer can trace its origins and rapid growth to the economic developments and legislation of the early 1980s, a time when the US was looking to enhance its global competitiveness. While countries like Germany and Japan were exceptionally good at translating the ideas that originated from academic labs into useful products, US academic research results were by and large relegated to mere publications in scholarly journals. Concerned about the non-use of this potential goldmine of ideas, the US lawmakers passed a series of legislation in the early 1980s culminating in the famous Bayh-Dole Act. This Act has shifted the onus of commercialization from a central granting agency to the numerous grantees that receive the research funds, and the grantees have taken very enthusiastically to this shift. The Economist has lauded this Bill as the most inspired piece of legislation in the last half century.

In the middle of 2003, Marc LaForce was having trouble sleeping. As the director of the Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP), he was missing a vital piece of a difficult puzzle. The MVP sought to commercialize a vaccine that would help prevent Africa’s devastating epidemics of meningococcal meningitis, a bacterial infection of the brain and spinal cord. The largest documented outbreak, in 1996, sickened 250,000 people in Africa and caused 25,000 deaths. In 2002, a single West African country (Burkina Faso) had 13,000 meningitis cases and at least 1,500 deaths.

To succeed, the MVP needed a vaccine production method with two essential qualities: very effective and very affordable. But in mid-2003, that search hit a dead end. “All projects have their ups and downs,” says LaForce, M.D. “We were in the downest of downs.”

This week, FDA issued final guidance on incorporating and integrating radio frequency wireless technology into medical devices, Bloomberg BNA reports.

In a blog post on Tuesday, FDA Senior Policy Adviser Bakul Patel wrote, “Our goal is to help industry develop a range of innovative, safe and effective medical devices that incorporate wireless technology, which can, in turn, help reduce health care costs, enhance quality and benefit patients and providers alike” (Weixel, Bloomberg BNA, 8/14).

The new landscape for venture capital investing does not seem to leave much room for classic company formation. Investor after investor has shut down or moved beyond startups into what seem like greener pastures.

So it should come as no surprise that at least a few VC firms are now expanding into the royalty space, as shown by a deal announced this week. Aisling Capital and Clarus Ventures, two top-tier VC firms, acquired 20 percent of the royalty stream created by sales of ibrutinib, a novel tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed by Pharmacyclics (NASDAQ: PCYC) and partnered with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) for use in B-cell malignancies such as chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

With the global tuberculosis epidemic becoming more deadly, costly, and difficult to treat, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) and Aeras today signed a memorandum of understanding to advance research and development of new tuberculosis vaccines. An improved TB vaccine offers the best hope for eliminating this airborne infectious disease that kills 1.4 million people worldwide each year.  

While China has achieved significant reductions in TB illness and death over the past 30 years, TB remains a major public threat, with over one million new cases in China each year. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year found that one in 10 cases of TB in China are resistant to the most commonly-used drugs. Based on the World Health Organization’s estimates of global multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), China has the highest annual number of cases of MDR-TB in the world—a quarter of the cases worldwide.

DreamIt Health Demo Day has gotten a lot of great press, from Philly.com to NewsWorks to Technical.ly Philly, and many more. These plaudits are well deserved: DreamIt Health was the first Philadelphia-based health care accelerator, and by all accounts it was a huge success. Ten health care startup companies participated in this venture, made possible by a collaboration between Independence Blue Cross (IBC), Penn Medicine, and DreamIt Ventures. The more than 300 attendees to the Demo Day on July 24, 2013 included potential investors and customers, mentors, and health care executives.

We at Wharton Entrepreneurship are delighted, and not only because this event was such a terrific demonstration of the robust community of heath care entrepreneurs in the Philly region. We’re proud to point out that the founders of four of the presenting companies and both of the speakers are all Wharton Entrepreneurship alumni, several of whom went through our Venture Initiation Program (VIP)! If that’s not a demonstration of Knowledge in Action, then I don’t know what is.