News Archive

A week after Cleveland’s nascent biotech accelerator BioMotiv bumped its financial reserves to $46 million, Torrey Pines Investment has stepped in to offer a $20 million commitment and close ties to the Russian drug development industry to back a joint effort to spawn new translational drug efforts around the globe.

In the pact, Torrey Pines Investment will work with its connections in the Russian and the Ukrainian pharma industry to facilitate the R&D networks that BioMotiv is developing. Far from the mainstream of the biotech industry’s global hubs, BioMotiv has been piecing together an effort to get new biomedical advances in academia into the clinic, positioning the programs for an out-licensing deal with a biotech or pharma company that can take them the remaining distance to a potential regulatory approval. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and several individual investors have now bumped its capital reserves as BioMotiv scouts for additional capital to complete its fundraising effort.

HHS is working to attract entrepreneurial talent to create a culture that supports risk-taking and accelerates innovation.

HHSentrepreneurs is based on the HHS Innovation Fellows Program launched in 2012. HHSentrepreneurs builds on lessons learned during the pilot HHS Innovation Fellows Program, and will:

• Identify HHS staff who are working on some of the Department’s toughest challenges and
• Match these talented individuals with External Entrepreneurs for a period of 6-12 months.

HHSentrepreneurs provides a novel framework to attract outside talent in areas including open innovation, agile development, and lean methodologies to accelerate innovation within HHS. Startup organizations have demonstrated that rapid iteration between various versions or features of a product can yield successful results, and HHS would like to promote these methods internally to address high-priority projects.

No factor defines success and failure for a drug company more than this: Companies that invent more, better drugs at a lower cost do better than those that hemorrhage cash but never get an important product to market. Yet 19 in 20 medicines in experimental development fail, meaning a great many companies fail too.

For years, researchers, including one team from Tufts University and another at Eli Lilly, have estimated the cost of inventing and developing a drug at $1 billion or more. These estimates try to exclude costs not directly related to a drug’s approval and also don’t allow for any comparisons between companies. Last year, for the first time, I did something far cruder: I took the 15-year research spending of a group of big pharmaceutical companies and divided it by the number of new drugs (technically new molecular entities, the Food and Drug Administration’s term for drug molecules that have not been approved in any form for any use previously).

Some hospitals are turning to technology entrepreneurs to reduce readmission rates and avoid penalties imposed under the Affordable Care Act, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

Background

Last year, an ACA provision went into effect that allows CMS to penalize hospitals for excess readmissions of Medicare patients.

The penalties are based on the number of heart failure, heart attack or pneumonia patients above the national average who are readmitted within 30 days to an acute-care hospital.

Kleiner Perkins, the investor behind Google and Amazon, and Accel Partners, best known for its investment in Facebook, are putting $18 million into MyFitnessPal, a little-known digital-health startup that has helped its 40 million-plus users shed a collective 100 million pounds.

Despite those accomplishments, this is the first time MyFitnessPal has raised money from professional investors, which raises the question: Do venture capitalists have any idea what they’re doing in the networked fitness market?

For most of us, the blister packs our medicines come in are just temporary barriers to be scratched open with our fingernails or popped open like Chiclets. We usually don’t even pay attention to the tiny, vaguely printed expiration dates tattooed on the silver skin of our aspirin or cough medicine’s packaging; we take for granted that it’s in date.

Yet around the world, billions of people can’t take the expiration dates of their medication for granted. Doing so can, and often is, fatal. A new concept could put an end to that by encapsulating our medicines in strips that change color as they expire, transforming the packaging of dangerously out-of-date medication into a chromatic warning. But will big pharma bring it to market?

The University of Maryland announced Monday that long-time finance professor Alexander J. Triantis has been appointed dean of the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Triantis, 49, succeeds G. “Anand” Anandalingam, who left the post at the end of June to take a position in London as dean of the Imperial College Business School. Triantis will assume the position Sept. 1.

Money may not make the world go round, but it does keep companies innovating. The Small Business & Technology Development Center has made formal a longstanding relationship with BBCetc., an Ann Arbor-based development consulting company with a specialty in helping businesses secure federal grant funding for commercialization and growth.

The partnership will utilize BBCetc.’s extensive background in federal research grant proposals with the SBTDC’s statewide organization and presence to assist companies with writing proposals specifically for the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer federal research grants.

by Joseph P. Allen and Diane Palmintera

The Final ReportOn May 20, 2013, the White House Lab-To-Market Inter-Agency Summit was held in Washington, D.C. The Summit was organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Institutes of Health’s Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The purpose of the meeting was extraordinary: asking national experts outside of the federal agency system to recommend ways to increase the return-on-investment for the $140 billion annual taxpayer expenditure on federally-funded research and development.

The format for the meeting also was unusual. Research agencies nominated 20 national experts experienced in various phases of technology commercialization to participate in the Summit. The Administration placed no preconditions or limitations on the expert Panel and asked it to focus on “transformative” ideas. We were privileged to be asked to serve as the Summit’s co-chairs.

The Administration requested that the Panel address several overarching questions:

• How can agencies better align themselves to more effectively promote the commercial development of their research;
• How can effective metrics for various stages of these efforts be developed; and
• How can we better leverage multi-agency resources to enhance the public’s return-on-investment through the commercialization of more federally-funded technologies?