News Archive

Ever heard of a hospital setting up a digital health operation within a single center of excellence? We hadn’t, either, until this week, when the Temple Lung Center at Temple University Health System in Philadelphia announced the establishment of the Center for Digital Health.

Dr. Gerard Criner, founding chair of Temple’s Department of Thoracic Medicine and Surgery, which started up in February, leads the Center for Digital Health. He also founded and continues to serve as chairman of  HGE Health Care Solutions, a Temple spinoff that has built a mobile app that helps clinicians manage patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder.

Illumina, Inc. ILMN, today announced Illumina Accelerator—the world’s first business accelerator focused solely on creating an innovation ecosystem for the genomics industry—has selected three new startups for its second funding cycle. Selected from a competitive pool of highly qualified applicants, the new startups from across the globe are spurring genomics innovation in healthcare, agriculture, and the winemaking industry.

Apparently, requiring scientists to state their objectives ahead of time makes a big difference.

Around 2000, the U.S. government ordered researchers conducting clinical trials with federal money to announce ahead of time which medical question they were hoping to answer.

We told you Tuesday about the first-ever White House demo day on Tuesday, which featured 32 early- to growth-stage companies sharing their personal stories and demonstrating their technologies.

And now, some prizes: Six Greater Washington accelerators were awarded prizes from the Small Business Administration, the SBA announced. It was part of a $4.4 million national program encouraging entrepreneurship, according to the SBA.

This paper is a final project from the NIH Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences course — TECH 566: Biotechnology Management

Starting up a company is a risky endeavor. From listening to the FAES 566’s course panel discussions this semester, it is clear that there are many challenges a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) will face and try to overcome while starting up and exiting his/her company. Fortunately, we also learned that there are numerous resources available to assist new entrepreneurs in developing strategies for management, funding, technology transactions, and approaches to exit, to name a few.

Blood is one of those things Americans take for granted.

Here, when patients are rushed to the hospital after an accident and are losing a lot of blood, we assume the hospital will have units of donated blood ready to hook up when the ambulance arrives. We don’t think about how much each unit of blood costs — yes, it has a price — because we have health insurance that pays the bill.

After 10 years as a successful veterinarian, Ignacio “Nacho” Pino decided to dedicate himself to work that could bring state-of-the-art biotechnology research to his home of Puerto Rico.

CDI Laboratories—a company he founded in 2008 along with Johns Hopkins University researchers Heng Zhu and Seth Blackshaw, JHU professor emeritus Jef Boeke, and two others (Dan Eichinger and Joe Bonaventura)—aims to produce research-grade protein and antibody products that support scientific research on cancer, autoimmunity, and infectious diseases. The company is one of more than 30 startups being showcased in Washington, D.C., today as part of the first-ever White House Demo Day, which will highlight the work of a diverse group of entrepreneurs from across the country.

AstraZeneca Plc and Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc. will work together, expanding an earlier collaboration, to seek gene therapy treatments for diseases affecting the heart, kidneys and the body’s metabolism.

AstraZeneca agreed to pay Isis an upfront fee of $65 million plus development and regulatory milestones for each program that the London-based drugmaker advances to clinical development, the companies said in a statement. Isis, based in Carlsbad, California, will earn tiered double-digit royalties on annual sales of each program.

During a tour to Paris, Bruce Springsteen explained that his dream was for the US to adapt a Swedish style welfare state. The famous musician is far from alone in idealizing Nordic policies. The four Nordic nations (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) are often regarded as prime role-models the policies to be emulated by others. Internationally, advocates of left of centre policies view these countries as examples of how high tax social democratic systems are viable and successful. Paul Krugman, for example, has said: “Every time I read someone talking about the ‘collapsing welfare states of Europe’, I have this urge to take that person on a forced walking tour of Stockholm”.