University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Johns Hopkins University are among 12 universities that will share a $20 million grant for groundbreaking nanotechnology research.
The institutions are all part of the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The five-year, $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation will support the center research of how nanoparticles interact with live beings and the environment.
Synthetic Biologics, a microbiome-focused clinical-stage biotechnology company, is moving its offices to the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus. Synthetic Biologics previously had its corporate headquarters at the VisArts incubator space in downtown Rockville but is moving its staff of 15 to the JHU campus, with plans to add more staff members in the future. The company has its administrative and financial offices in Ann Arbor, Mich.
The company is developing drugs to protect the gut microbiome in an effort to maintain the natural balance of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, which is important to our overall health, said Kris Maly, the company’s vice president of corporate communications.
A lot of time, effort and money goes into the creation of new drugs. A new game Big Pharma, which came out Thursday, is giving users the opportunity to see for themselves by running a virtual pharmaceutical company.
Not unlike Big Pharma in real life, one of your biggest priorities is money. It’s up to you whether or not you want to sacrifice efficacy to make cheaper products and yield more profit.
A digital health fund to invest in Israeli digital health startups recently made its first investment — Intendu. The company provides a way for people with neurological problems stemming from traumatic brain injury to age-related cognitive decline to train the brain through a series of personalized exercises that involve body-controlled adaptive videogames. The goals are customized to each user.
Partners for digital health venture fund eHealth Ventures include Cleveland Clinic Innovations, which is providing resources to the company in exchange for equity, and one of Israel’s largest HMOs, Maccabi Healthcare, are also supporting the fund.
A Madison-based research hub devoted to evaluating the environmental effect of nanotechnology has received $20 million in National Science Foundation funding over the next five years.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is the host institution for the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, led by Robert Hamers, a chemistry professor at UW-Madison whose research has helped spawn a spinoff company focusing on building more powerful and more stable batteries for hybrid cars and electric vehicles.
Google is making another move into the profitable sphere of diabetes management: Its Life Sciences arm—which will soon fall under Google’s new parent company, Alphabet—is announcing a partnership with Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company, to build new treatment products for diabetes. The two firms will collaborate on product development and new methods for monitoring the condition.
Vaxin Inc., a clinical stage immunotherapy and vaccine company, today announced that it has changed its corporate name to Altimmune, Inc. Vaxin was founded in 1997 to pioneer new-generation vaccine technologies and products. Since then, the company has achieved steady success, developing promising vaccine candidates for biodefense and other public health needs, as well as animal health. In a strategic growth move earlier this year, the company acquired UK-based Immune Targeting Systems (ITS) and added prominent new investors to its syndicate. The acquisition vaulted Vaxin into the immunotherapeutics sector, growing its therapeutics expertise, expanding its market, and broadening its global footprint. The new name marks the next chapter for the newly combined company.
“The Vaxin brand has served as a superb ambassador of our vaccine product family, but the expansion of our product platform calls for a new brand,” said president and CEO, Bill Enright. “The name Altimmune reflects the novel solutions we bring to the broader biotech marketplace today. Bold emphasis on the immune system is intentional; it speaks to alternative therapies that stimulate immune responses for prevention and treatment of diseases. With some of today’s most exciting research discoveries happening in this area, our new name conveys a promise to deliver essential innovation to the space.”
Since Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act on July 10th, one Big Pharma company has already moved to capitalize on the legislation even before it has been passed by the Senate and become law. A good introduction to the bill can be found in this piece. In short, the bill is designed to speed up the route to market for certain therapeutics. Senate passage is estimated for around December. In the last piece I paid particular attention to one of the most consequential aspects of the Act – that it would promote the development of brand-new antibiotics. In response to the Act, there have been two interpretations of this likely influx of therapeutics.
Transplant surgeons have started using a device that allows them to “reanimate” hearts from people who have recently died, and use the organs to save others.
The “heart in a box” is a wheeled cart with an oxygen supply, a sterile chamber, and tubing to clamp onto a donor heart and keep it fed with blood and nutrients. Doctors say it may extend the time a heart can last outside the body and is letting them recover hearts from donors who haven’t been eligible before.
If there’s one thing that’s a nearly universal anxiety among cities, it’s brain drain, or the loss of educated residents to other places. I’ve written about this many times over the years, critiquing the way it is normally conceived.
Since brain drain seems to be a major concern in shrinking cities, I decided to take a look at the facts around brains in those places. Looking at the 28 metro areas among the 100 largest that had objective measures of shrinkage – in population and/or jobs – between 2000 and 2013, I looked what what happened to their educational attainment levels.
