News Archive

The Pentagon’s research and development division, DARPA—the creative force behind the internet and GPS—retooled itself three years ago to create a new office dedicated to unraveling biology’s engineering secrets. The new Biological Technologies Office (BTO) has a mission to “harness the power of biological systems” and design new defense technology. Over the past year, with a budget of about $296 million, it has been exploring challenges including memory improvement, human–machine symbiosis and speeding up disease detection and response.

Ask anyone to identify Baltimore’s big anchors, and Under Armour and Johns Hopkins will likely appear in the same sentence.

Now the two are teaming up — brought together by tech.

Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC, New York State and the New York Genome Center today announced a collaboration to launch a new JLABS in New York City. Called JLABS @ NYC, the 30,000-square foot facility will be located at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) in SoHo and will open in 2018. The project is receiving $17 million in New York State funding. The site will be open to biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer health companies. A QuickFire Challenge seeking companies working in these areas, particularly startups working on cross-sector solutions to prevent, intercept or cure diseases, will be launched by Johnson & Johnson Innovation, with the winner(s) eligible for one year of residency at JLABS @ NYC.

IBM Watson Health and Illumina have officially joined forces, announcing a new partnership on Monday as the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference kicks off.

Watson Health is a serial collaborator, but it chose a pivotal agreement to spotlight at JPM. By integrating with Illumina’s platform, the two companies can create an end-to-end tumor sequencing workflow that could increase accessibility and scalability in the field. It could also address a major problem, said Watson Health Vice President Steve Harvey; a lack of standardization.

Below is 450+ pages of our most popular research reports from last year. As always, if you find these reports helpful, share with friends. If you think they’re terrible, please send to your enemies.

From a brand new take on the electric breast pump to a discreet way to check sobriety during a night on the town, trust us, there’s a lot of neat stuff on the horizon.

Dickson Data is back at it. On Thursday it released a new infographic [below] showing which drug patents are set to expire in 2017.

It follows the template of its popular 2016 infographic, which highlighted several major biopharma threats and trends. Times were tough for AstraZeneca, which had $7.4 billion in sales under threat as Crestor and Seroquel XR lose patent exclusivity.

Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI), the genomics-driven, health intelligence company, today announced Cynthia Collins as the new Chief Executive Officer effective January 9, 2017. Collins, who has a successful track record and extensive leadership experience in the life sciences sector, will lead HLI and be responsible for all functions of the company including commercialization of HLI key products and strategic operations. She will also join the Board of Directors.

Venter, who is a co-founder, will relinquish the CEO role but will continue to serve as Executive Chairman of the HLI Board of Directors and will remain in a daily role leading the scientific strategy and direction of HLI.

Vtesse, Inc., a company committed to developing medicines to benefit patients with ultra rare, life-threatening diseases, announced today the appointment of Jason Meyenburg as Chief Commercial Officer. Mr. Meyenburg joins the company from Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where he most recently served as Senior Vice President, Commercial Operations, The Americas.

“As we near completion of enrollment in our pivotal Phase 2b/3 clinical trial of our lead drug candidate, VTS-270, our primary goal is to advance regulatory submissions. Assuming we receive favorable responses from U.S. and European regulatory agencies, our next goal will be to rapidly provide access to VTS-270 for the children suffering from NPC and its debilitating symptoms,” said Ben Machielse, Drs., President and Chief Executive Officer of Vtesse, Inc. “As someone with deep experience supporting the roll out of rare disease medicines, Jason has the know-how, passion and dedication required to help us to quickly make VTS-270 available for patients in need, pending regulatory approvals.”