News

3-V Biosciences, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company developing therapeutics that modulate key pathways in oncology and infectious disease, today announced the completion of a Series C financing round, raising $20 million. Proceeds from the financing will be used to advance 3-V’s lead oncology candidate into a Phase 1 clinical trial and to conduct ongoing preclinical studies of multiple virology leads generated by the company’s integrated drug discovery process. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates participated in the round.

UK-based healthcare company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has announced an investment of €17.5m ($23.5m) in a French venture firm to develop new drugs that have the potential to target rare diseases in Europe.

The Kurma Biofund II fund is led by Paris-based venture capital firm Kurma Life Science Partners (KLS) and is supported by other investors namely, CDC Entreprises, Idinvest Partners and New Enterprise Associates.

A tiny, tin-coated piece of wood could one day be used as a high capacity and environmentally benign battery.

A team of researchers at the University of Maryland constructed a nano-scale, sodium-ion battery from a sliver of wood more than 1,000 times thinner than paper.

“The inspiration behind the idea comes from the trees,” said Liangbing Hu, an assistant professor of materials science, in a press release. “Wood fibers that make up a tree once held mineral-rich water, and so are ideal for storing liquid electrolytes, making them not only the base but an active part of the battery.”

BlueCross BlueShield of Louisiana and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts will provide online healthcare to their members with technology from American Well.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana plans to leverage American Well’s telehealth platform as an added feature of its new Quality Blue Primary Care population health and quality improvement program, and will create multiple avenues to use this technology in other programs.

As our next receipt date is approximately 6 weeks away, we wanted to send a reminder to all new (and returning) HHS applicants about the required registrations needed before you can submit your SBIR/STTR grant to grants.gov. This includes the new requirement to register with the SBA Company Registry. It is never too early to start the registration process, even if you are thinking about submitting for December 5th or beyond, but especially for August 5th!

Applicant Organizations

Applicant organizations must complete and maintain the following registrations as described in the SF 424 (R&R) Application Guide to be eligible to apply for or receive an award. All registrations must be completed prior to the application being submitted. Registration can take 6 weeks or more, so applicants should begin the registration process as soon as possible. The NIH Policy on Late Submission of Grant Applications states that failure to complete registrations in advance of a due date is not a valid reason for a late submission.

iVantage Health Analytics, a leading provider of health care informatics and business analytics solutions that transform complex data into actionable business intelligence, announced it has raised $10 million in growth equity from Great Point Partners (GPP). The equity investment will fund expanded sales and marketing efforts, additional investment in technology infrastructure and personnel expansion.

SC&H Capital, an investment banking and advisory firm focused on middle market and growth companies, served as the sole placement agent to iVantage Health Analytics in connection with the transaction.

Venture capital firms—and the high-tech startups they support—historically concentrated in suburban office parks, such as Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle.

Richard Florida, co-founder and editor of The Atlantic Cities and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, has crunched the available data and found (along with some other studies) a shift underway within the venture capital community away from the suburbs and towards urban areas.

Business, civic, and political leaders in St. Louis are coming together to raise $100 million in private funds over the next five years to support the Regional Entrepreneurial Initiative, a new effort aimed at helping emerging regional businesses grow and thrive. The project was launched with funding from the federal government and will draw on several ongoing fundraising initiatives in the community. About 80 percent of the funds will be used to provide capital support for startup businesses, with the remaining 20 percent directed toward entrepreneurial support and mentoring, according to the St. Louis Beacon.

In April 2012, the city and county of St. Louis invited stakeholders to develop a regional economic development strategy that would guide efforts to grow and retain high-growth startups. The St. Louis Regional Entrepreneurship Initative Report received financial assistance from the Economic Development Administration (EDA), the state of Missouri, and the St. Louis County Economic Council. The findings of the report suggest that the St. Louis region has a growing cluster of resources to support entrepreneurship, but that they are not of uniform quality and not distributed evenly across sectors. For example, the region’s bioscience sector is relatively well-supported through the efforts of such organizations at BioSTL, BioGenerator and the Helix Center Biotech Incubator. Information technology companies, however, have few local organizations and programs to rely on for support. Resources for the agricultural, energy and advanced manufacturing sectors remain scarce and uncoordinated.

The NIH has been faced with considerable difficulties as of late in terms of finding the required means to continue moving science forward at the early stage. However, the group recently announced a commitment of $12.7 million to a novel project – funding further research on assets that have been cast-off by big pharma in key indication areas that represent a significant unmet medical need (e.g. Alzheimers, Duchenne, etc.). The initiative has been fittingly named Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, and it may be a groundbreaking solution to several problems facing drug development today. These include reducing time to market, alleviating early stage investment risk, and creating even more incentive for research scientists to orient themselves towards commercialization of research.

The America Invents Act (AIA), also known as the “patent reform bill,” is designed to modernize the U.S. patent system. One provision of the new bill, that went into effect in March, converts the United States from first-to-invent to a first-inventor-to-file system. You’ve had a few months to get used to the new law, but if you’re still wondering how it could affect biotech and medical-device products you invent, you’re not alone.

The new first-inventor-to-file patent law means that the first person or company to file a patent application on an invention has the right to pursue the patent on it. While this is new in the U.S., it’s the system that’s already being used in every other country in the world. So now the United States should be in synch with the rest of the world, right? Well, not quite.