News Archive

Circulomics today announced a $1.5 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to create nucleic acid extraction products based on its Nanobind technology.

The firm said in a statement that it would use the grant to develop Nanobind technologies for automated and microvolume clinical sample preparation. It is building a pipeline of chemistries to extract DNA and RNA from sample types including cultured cells, blood, and other fluids, and from pathogens.

Health care remains one of the few services that require people to have a face-to-face interaction to obtain access. But more and more consumers are questioning that reality, and change is on the way. In January 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a new provider reimbursement code for non–face-to-face health care services for patients who have chronic medical conditions. A new CMS code may seem like a tiny matter, but this one emblemizes a larger shift toward delivering health services independently of time and place, enabled by technologies such as smartphones, sensors, and wireless health-monitoring devices — what we in the field call telemedicine.

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center has created a $15 million program to develop the ideas, discoveries and inventions of its faculty and staff members into life-science technologies that can benefit patients.

The Technology Development Program will be operated by Wake Forest Baptist in partnership with Pappas Capital, a science investment firm based in Durham. Pappas Capital will manage the money for the program with Wake Forest Innovations, which is responsible for accelerating the commercialization of the specialized research capabilities for licensing to established companies or startups.

Disruption is coming for the big, regulated industries that were once investment no-nos: education, energy, healthcare and the sciences. And that’s good news for Baltimore.

At least two big trends are causing a flood of interest in these more complicated sectors.

Boston Scientific BSX, +1.51% this week announced the start of the Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge, an open innovation contest designed to encourage advancements in the use of remote patient monitoring to enhance patient care. Until January 5, 2016, clinicians, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs can submit their ideas and collaborate on solutions through Medstro’s social networking site (www.Medstro.com).

The Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge is seeking submissions designed to improve patient care and/or drive down the cost of health care through the use of remote patient monitoring technologies such as wearable, implantable or ubiquitous sensors, with a preference for innovations in the management of the flow of data and the decision making process. Finalists will be honored at a live event in Cambridge, MA where they will present their ideas to the Challenge sponsors, fellow participants and a live audience. Up to $25,000 of services in kind may be divided among Challenge winners to further develop or pilot their ideas.

An FDA decision summary released today allows DNA-testing company 23andMe to market a genome test that screens for Bloom syndrome, a rare disorder that leads to a predisposition in carriers toward the development of cancer. In February, the FDA announced it would approved the Bloom test, but 23andMe was unable to begin marketing these tests until today’s detailed regulations and guidelines were announced. While, on the surface, this may seem like a minor change in policy, it is significant given the complex relationship the FDA has had with 23andMe over the last two years.

If you end up near the Baltimore Convention Center this week, you may notice crowds of people carrying black and teal tote bags. The American Society of Human Genetics is meeting there through Saturday, bringing 8,000 researchers, clinicians and ethicists from more than 60 countries to the city.

We are thrilled to bring our annual meeting back to Baltimore (our most visited venue), where research of all kinds has a long history and still thrives today. Last year, Baltimore institutions including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Medical School received more than $800 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — providing a beacon of hope not just for the residents of Baltimore but the entire world. Thanks to funding from NIH, the National Science Foundation and other federal science agencies, Hopkins is ranked number one among all U.S. institutions for research and development expenditures — and has been for 35 straight years.

GE Ventures (NYSE:GE) and health innovation company StartUp Health said they plan to expand their partnership to invest and support startups in the healthcare innovation sector.

The expansion will allow the partners to accept 10 new qualified companies into their “StartUp Health Academy” program. The 2 companies originally launched their startup focused partnership program in 2013 with 15 consumer health companies.

Patient engagement company GetWellNetwork is taking a crack at re-envisioning healthcare with the introduction of the Interactive Care Model for nursing, a five-phase plan to create patient-centric care delivery systems.

“This new model rethinks care delivery and includes measurement of a person’s capacity to engage in his/her health,” representatives of Bethesda, Maryland-based GetWellNetwork’s O’Neil Center wrote in an article published in the October issue of the Journal of Nursing Administration. The O’Neil Center is tasked with supporting “integration of patient and family engagement into healthcare delivery across the care continuum,” according to GetWellNetwork.

In the fall of 2014, the HBS-HMS Forum on Health Care Innovation launched the inaugural Health Acceleration Challenge — a “scale up” competition that focuses on compelling solutions to problems in health care delivery that have already been implemented at a small scale and have the potential for wider dissemination.

The contest produced some useful innovations. Many of them are easily adoptable by other organizations, proving our assertion that there is no shortage of innovations in health care; rather the problem is that they take too long to be adopted by others.