For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.
The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.
Nearly 40% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, with about 1.7 million of those cases expected in 2016 in the United States (according to the National Cancer Institute). These patients are hoping for better treatments and, hopefully someday, cures. They could also be valuable resources, helping experts develop better therapies, if only staff at research centers like Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston could study their unique cases. Even patients with the same diagnosis, such as breast cancer, have different genetic makeups, both in their healthy cells and in their tumors. These differences provide clues to new genetic factors that may cause the disease, why some patients respond especially well to certain treatments, why some tumors are so resistant to treatment, and how people of different ages or ethnicities are affected.
More and more, pharma companies are making real bets in digital health, and reorganizing their businesses to put some power behind those efforts. The space is, in some ways, quieter than it was this time last year, but there’s reason to believe that quiet is a calm before a storm of activity, driven more by pharma’s tendency to keep early-stage projects close to the chest than by a lack of activity. The executives we spoke to for this report talked about initiatives with real potential for broad commercialization.
MEDICAL technology company BD Diagnostics is sponsoring the Manufacturing Business of the Year Award 2016 – for the third year running.
The Roborough-based firm was named Plymouth’s top manufacturer at the 2013 Herald Business Awards and has since then supported the category.
By now, we all know the varied challenges created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — device tax introduction, reimbursement contraction, provider and payer consolidation, and pricing compression, just to name a few. But several years ago, the ACA’s potential impact was only speculation. We were looking into our educated crystal balls, but we didn’t have the data to see what trends would develop, or what those trends could lead to in the coming decade. Now, part of that picture is starting to take shape.
PathSensors, Inc., a leading biotechnology and environmental testing company, has relocated to the Columbus Center in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The company now occupies over 4,000 square feet of laboratory, office, and manufacturing space. The new facilities represent a space increase of more than double over the University of Maryland BioPark, where the company was previously located.
Montgomery County Department of Economic Development and Maryland Technology Development Corporation are collaborating to assist Montgomery County life sciences companies to make progress toward commercialization.
With this collaboration, Montgomery County companies selected for TEDCO’s Life Sciences Investment Fund will become automatically eligible to receive a financial supplement of $25,000 from DED’s Life Sciences IMPACT Grant Program.
Ted Leonsis, himself a notable entrepreneurial output of Georgetown University, and his family have pledged $1 million toward a new “Leonsis Family Entrepreneurship Prize.” The fund will provide financial support to Georgetown students looking to start business ventures “that address problems in the world.”
The United States ranks 1st in how its domestic policies support worldwide life sciences innovation, according to an analysis released today by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a global technology policy think tank. Released on World Health Day, the findings come in a new report assessing 56 countries—which together comprise close to 90 percent of the world’s economy—on the extent to which their scientific research, drug pricing, and intellectual property policies contribute to global biopharmaceutical innovation.
U.S. R&D investment currently accounts for 2.7% of GDP, according to the newest R&D Funding Report put out by AAAS. While the United States still invests the most dollars into R&D globally, there has been a huge uptick in investments among Asian countries. China aims to invest 2.5% of its GDP in R&D by 2020 and is also expected to catch the U.S. in real dollars invested in R&D by 2020 as well.
