The White House is getting ready to honor five years since the creation of Challenge.gov — the central web portal for government competitions intended to spur innovation and solve problems — with a forward-looking celebration.
Touting the $72 million in prizes awarded across 400 challenges in the last five years, the Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a special event this fall that will highlight some of the major breakthroughs and civic issues solved through the program.
Synthetic Biologics, Inc. (nyse mkt:SYN), a clinical-stage company focused on developing therapeutics to protect the microbiome while targeting pathogen-specific diseases, today announced that it has commenced an underwritten public offering of shares of its common stock. All of the shares in the offering are to be sold by Synthetic Biologics. The Company intends to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 15 percent of the share amount sold to cover over-allotments, if any. The offering is subject to market conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be completed, or as to the actual size or terms of the offering.
Jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) represent some of the best opportunities for workers in today’s economy. The work can be rewarding as well as coming with high pay and good benefits (like a 401(k) and health insurance). Diversity in STEM, however is a problem, one that has captured the attention of CEOs like Jeff Bezos and policymakers including the president himself.
The truism about biopharma being a global industry has never been truer than when it comes to the top 20 IPOs for the first half of this year.
The U.S. had exactly half of the therapeutic, diagnostics, and tools/tech IPOs that were completed or began trading their first shares on public markets during January-June 2015. The rest of the world accounted for the other half, with Europe being home to seven of the 10 ex-U.S. top IPOs, followed by China, Canada, and Bermuda with one each.
I’m a huge fan of R&D collaborations between pharma and academia, so I should be thrilled by Sanofi’s latest tie-up with seven top-tier centers – so why do I have mixed feelings?
On first glance, there’s a lot to like: Sanofi has committed $2.4M per year to seven top centers, including Johns Hopkins, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Columbia, to fund about 20-25 seed projects annually, with no strings attached and a wide-open scope. Who knows what will emerge – but it won’t take much for this to look like a pretty good investment for Sanofi.
Funding and Research Opportunities
The following funding opportunity announcements from the NHLBI or other components of the National Institutes of Health, might be of interest:
Notices:
Request for Applications:
Please note that most links to RFAs, PAs, and Guide Notices will take you to the NIH Web site. RFPs will take you to FedBizOpps. Links to RFPs will not work past their proposal receipt date. Archived versions of RFPs posted on FedBizOpps can be found on the FedBizOpps site using the FedBizOpps search function. Under “Document to Search,” select Archived Documents.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) awards a two-year $19.7M contract to Emergent Biosystems (NYSE:EBS) to develop and manufacture cGMP (current good manufacturing practice) lots of three Ebola monoclonal antibodies in CHO (Chinese hamster ovary) cell lines at a scale of 2,000 liters.
American companies continued to attract eye-watering sums of money from venture capitalists in the last quarter, according to a report released Friday.
U.S. firms picked up more than $17 billion in 1,189 deals through the second quarter of 2015, the highest amount since 2000, according to the report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, which is based on data from Thomson Reuters.
Last fall, David Narrow and his colleagues reached a critical juncture in the development of their fledgling medical technology company, Sonavex. As Narrow puts it, their brainchild needed nurturing, and a suitable—and affordable—environment for it to happen in.
The company’s core concept, he says, was worth the TLC. Narrow and Johns Hopkins Hospital plastic surgeon resident Devin O’Brien Coon, who met while studying in Johns Hopkins’ biomedical engineering graduate program in the Whiting School’s Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design, had identified a clinical problem that needed addressing. Each year, more than 550,000 people in the United States undergo medical procedures—soft-tissue reconstruction, organ transplants, bypass surgeries—in which arteries or veins are surgically connected, exposing the patient to the risk of a blood clot. Detecting the clot in a timely manner, before it blocks the vessels and leads to catastrophic complications, becomes paramount. What’s needed, Narrow says, is a real-time clot-monitoring device that can be used by nurses post-surgery.
Symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease include tremor, muscle stiffness, and slowed movement that make it difficult to execute such simple tasks as holding an eating utensil steady, and patients currently have few options for relief outside of a hospital or clinic. Some medications can help, but over time they tend to become less effective. To give Parkinson’s patients another in-home option, a research team of Johns Hopkins University graduate students have invented a headband-shaped device that delivers noninvasive brain stimulation to help suppress symptoms.
