News Archive

ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, announces the release of ATCC® Minis to support quality control (QC) testing in pharmaceutical and industrial labs, during the PDA 9th Annual Global Conference on Pharmaceutical Microbiology in Bethesda, MD, Booth # 304.

Healthcare, personal care product, and cosmetic manufacturers are required to test the bio-burden and sterility of their products and production environments to ensure consumer safety. Global alignment and harmonization of microbial testing requirements among the United States Pharmacopeia (USP), Japanese Pharmacopeia (JP), and European Pharmacopeia (EP), have resulted in the need for consistent and reliable control organisms at less than five passages from the ATCC reference stock for reproducible results.

A BIOTECHNOLOGY company founded by Limerick man Kieran Curran has been snapped up for $150m by a US firm.

GenCell Biosystems, a company based in Raheen with offices in the US, was acquired late last week by Becton Dickinson, a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

One of the two Ebola-infected Dallas nurses was admitted to a National Institutes of Health biocontainment unit in Bethesda on Thursday, just as researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore are beginning the first human trials of an Ebola vaccine in Africa.

Dr. Myron Levine, a researcher at the medical school, is a member of the international medical group leading the efforts to end the outbreak. Ebola has infected more than 8,000 people since the first reported case in March, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the Boston-versus-New York rivalry, the Red Sox and the Yankees were also-rans this baseball season. Now, Massachusetts and New York are in another battle for the No. 2 spot: U.S. venture capital investment.

New York is leading Massachusetts in total venture capital invested so far this year, which if it held up would be the first time the Empire State edged out its East Coast rival and took second place behind industry leader California since at least 1992.

Applications are now open for DreamIt Health’s second Baltimore cohort.

DreamIt Ventures will accept applications through Dec. 5, according to a DreamIt blog post. The first cohort last year included startups like Protenus, Aegle and Quantified Care.

A $5 million Innovation Challenge Fund (ICF), to encourage and support academic groups and small companies in collaborative efforts in the development of bioelectronic medicines, has been announced by GSK. This funding programme is in addition to the company’s prior commitment of a $1 million award (December 2013), for the team that first solves the GSK Bioelectronics Challenge.

Bioelectronic medicine is focused on producing miniaturised, implantable devices that could be programmed to read and correct electrical signals passing along the nerves of the body, to treat disorders as diverse as inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, asthma, hypertension and diabetes. The ICF funded work and the Innovation Challenge’s winning entry will be made freely available to the global research community.

A jaw-dropping report released by the World Health Organization on October 14, 2014 reveals that 1 in 20 Ebola infections has an incubation period longer than the 21 days which has been repeatedly claimed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

This may be the single most important — and blatantly honest — research report released by any official body since the beginning of the Ebola outbreak. The WHO’s “Ebola situation assessment” report, found here, explains that only 95% of Ebola infections experience incubation within the widely-reported 21-day period.

ASTRAZENECA has announced a four-way collaboration which will strengthen the pharmaceutical giant’s link with Cambridge University.

The firm, together with its biologics research and development arm MedImmune, has agreed the new collaboration as it prepares to move its global headquarters to the city. It builds on an existing strategic partnership between the organisations.

I joined J&J Consumer Companies about four years ago to start its Digital Center of Excellence. Our role initially was to build capabilities and develop strategy that served multiple brands in multiple regions, so I did a landscape overview to help develop the approach. What I saw was that we had hundreds of different websites and digital platforms that we were operating upon globally. If you want to get a message across globally on your owned assets, you need to do that in the same way across the world.