News Archive

“We are a team of guerrilla fundraisers who have launched a global campaign to fund research into a potential treatment for the cancer that killed Steve Jobs. The potential therapy, a cancer-busting virus, is currently sitting in a freezer in Sweden – but it can’t be tested for lack of just £2million” was iCancer’s pitch on Indiegogo, a crowdfunding portal. The company brought in more than $160,000 from this campaign.

Microryza is another crowdfunding platform exclusively for scientific research projects, available only to PhDs and professors who can attempt to raise money through this private channel instead of applying for grants.  “This solution helps close the gap for potential and promising, but unfunded projects,” Bill Gates says about Microryza. With Kickstartr’s popularity, there has been an explosion of growth in crowdfunding portals, both general as well as ones targeting a specific niche.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (NYSE:EBS) today announced the appointment of General George A. Joulwan (retired) to the company’s Board of Directors. General Joulwan has a highly distinguished military career that spans 36 years from 1961 to his retirement in 1997. Highlights of General Joulwan’s military service include: Serving as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR); Commander in Chief, U.S. Southern Command; Commanding General, V Corps and Commanding General, 3rd Armored Division, United States Army Europe and U.S. Seventh Army, Germany. He has received numerous military decorations and foreign awards and decorations for his bravery and service, including two Silver Stars for valor.

Fuad El-Hibri, executive chairman of the board of Emergent BioSolutions, stated, “General Joulwan has devoted his four-decade career to serving the country, protecting our freedoms, and architecting peace around the world. He is a true and distinguished public servant, who is highly-respected in the global military community. As we expand our portfolio with specialized products that address the needs of U.S. and worldwide governments, his expertise and stature will be invaluable in guiding Emergent’s management team towards further growth.”

Montgomery Business Development Corporation is pleased to announce the launch of their new website montgomerybusiness.org.

The enhanced website includes business-friendly features, data resources and information to support existing and future business and development in our vibrant economy.

About 20 kids garbed in lab coats, booties and goggles entered a laboratory on Friday through a door marked with a bright-red “BIOHAZARD” sticker.

Filling the small room, they gathered around lab coordinator and microbiologist Cindy Reichelderfer, who held up several petri dishes in which scientists had tested for the presence of anthrax.

A group of former executives from Martek Biosciences Corp. have formed a new company that plans to open memory and brain wellness clinics around the country.

Steve Dubin, who was Martek’s CEO, and David Abramson, who was the company’s president, are part of the group that formed NeurExpand Brain Performance Center. They are partnering with Dr. Majid Fotuhi, a Lutherville neurologist, who developed a 12-week program that uses diet, brain exercise and other factors to improve memory. Fotuhi is the author of several books on memory and is a Harvard Medical School graduate with a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University, according to his website.

Overseas medical technology companies continue to stream into Greater Boston, lured by the area’s famous ecosystem of researchers, startups, and potential collaborators.

One company that flew in under the radar was Qiagen N.V., a Dutch holding company with corporate offices in Germany, which quietly acquired two privately held Massachusetts companies last year and may—or may not—be expanding its foothold in the Boston area.

Rexahn Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE MKT: RNN), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, announced today that it has signed an exclusive license agreement with the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) for a novel drug delivery platform, Nano-Polymer-Drug Conjugate Systems (NPDCS). This technology targets the delivery of currently marketed chemotherapeutic agents directly into cancerous tumors. The direct delivery of chemotherapeutic drugs into the tumors has been shown to result in increased efficacy and reduced toxicity.

The NPDCS platform combines existing chemotherapeutic agents with a proprietary polymer carrier that contains a signaling moiety which directs the drug into the tumor. This approach minimizes the levels of freely circulating anti-cancer agents in the body, which can dramatically reduce potential adverse events, and maximizes anti-tumor activity by accumulating in the cancer tumor. NPDCS is a broad platform that has the potential to generate multiple therapeutic candidates going forward.

Summer wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the sandy shores of an ocean, bay, lake or river. As the gritty stuff gets in between your toes, you may wonder why beaches are distinctive sandy stretches and why sand looks and feels the way it does.

And then again, you might not — you didn’t come to the beach to think, did you? But for those in an asking mood, a sandy beach is essentially where pulverized, weathered rock along with some fragments of shelled creatures and other biota have collected, tossed up by the waves and as sediment from inland areas.

National Cancer Institute scientists have released the largest-ever database of cancer-related genetic variations, providing researchers the most comprehensive way so far to figure out how to target treatments for the disease.

Open access worldwide to the new database, based on genome studies, is expected to help researchers accelerate development of new drugs and better match patients with therapies, NCI said in a statement on Monday.

Here’s another reason the dysfunctional federal budget process is bad for Americans: besides hurting the economy and hitting us in the pocketbook, partisan feuding over budget cuts could undermine our health and even shorten our lives.

That’s because House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and others in Congress have been using the budget process to target research in the behavioral and social sciences for elimination, even though they’re indispensable to understanding and improving Americans’ health.