News

More than 60 companies showed off their health data applications at Datapalooza IV this week and Krishna Yeshwant, a partner at Google Ventures, was the MC for a demo session on Tuesday afternoon.

As one of the presenters was fighting with his PowerPoint demonstration and the projection system, Yeshwant answered a few questions about opportunities for healthcare startups with the search company’s investment group. He said that the outlook has changed for healthcare IT startups now that Obamacare is here to stay.

San Francisco digital health accelerator Rock Health is kicking off its fifth program next week, and it has some unique startups in the mix.

Bound to be the most talked about is Augmedix, which is developing a healthcare app for Google Glass. Co-founders Ian Shakil and Pelu Tran haven’t said much about exactly what kind of app they’re working on, but it apparently will leverage Glass’s augmented reality and voice activation to help doctors keep their focus on patients. Augmedix has already raised $55,000 from 32 Upstart backers.

The Chinese Biopharmaceutical Association, USA (CBA) will host the 18th Annual Conference at the University of Maryland Shady Grove Conference Center on Saturday, June 15th, 2013. The theme of this year’s conference is “Global Partnership in Biopharmaceutics and Translational Medicine;” it will address the critical importance of establishing worldwide collaboration to capture the great opportunity for the advancement of modern medicine and biopharmaceuticals.  

The Conference

The Conference includes five sessions:  

• Drug Discovery: New Strategies and Platforms
• Translational Genomics and anti-cancer therapy
• Opportunities in New high tech parks in China
• Regulatory Compliances in Biopharmaceuticals
• Collaborative Opportunities and Partnership for U.S.-China Biopharmaceuticals.

Baltimore ranks No. 4 on a new NerdWallet list of the best cities for recent college grads to live in.

The report from the financial literacy and consumer advocacy website is based on the median cost of rent, “walkability” of cities, number of young people, bars, and of course, unemployment rates.

Eight minutes: this is approximately (1) how long it takes sunlight to reach the earth; (2) how long it takes to hard-boil an egg (if you eat them) and (3) how long medical residents — doctors in training — spend with patients per day on average.

What’s more, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland have found that those eight minute are less than the amount of time that residents used to spend with patients (and make the standard 15 minutes allotted to a medical office visit seem generous).

If you’re a medical intern, most of what you need to do your job can be pulled off a computer screen: Blood test results. Paged messages. Orders to start a medication. All but, of course, how sick a patient is.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, suspecting that more and more of an intern’s time is spent in front of a computer, looked into just how today’s intern spends her working hours on an inpatient ward. They asked trained college students to shadow 29 internal medicine interns from two different Baltimore teaching hospitals and document how much time they spent talking to patients, eating lunch, reading charts, and the like — over the course of three weeks. Their recently published results confirm a trend that old-timers nostalgically lament and that those of us in training know to be all too true: Only a small percentage of our time is spent in direct patient care.

Remember Plexxikon? The Berkeley, CA-based company had a lot of talent for structural biology-based drug design, an impressive new treatment for melanoma, and a strong management team.

Two years ago, nobody on Wall Street cared one whit. Plexxikon flirted with the idea of going public, found little interest, and sold itself off to Japan-based Daiichi Sankyo for a more than 10-fold return on investment. It was a poster child for how dead the biotech IPO market was in 2010 and 2011.

Through new agreements with the Canadian BC Cancer Agency and Columbia University, the company now has access to biomarkers for lymphoma, glioblastoma, and several other cancers. These biomarkers will be developed into diagnostic assays that can assist physicians in choosing targeted treatments, Qiagen says.

The company’s glioblastoma cancer biomarker, acquired from Columbia University, detects the presence of FGFR-TACC fusion genes. The lymphoma biomarker, acquired from BC Cancer Agency, detects the Y641 EZH2 gene mutation. This type of lymphoma is targeted by pharmaceutical manufacturers like Epizyme and Constellation.

QIAGEN N.V. (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) today announced two agreements adding promising new biomarkers involving glioblastoma, lymphoma and other cancers to QIAGEN’s expanding portfolio of potential companion diagnostics that is being developed to help doctors use a patient’s genomic information to guide treatment decisions.

In the glioblastoma project, QIAGEN has entered into an exclusive worldwide licensing option on FGFR-TACC fusion genes with Columbia University in New York. QIAGEN intends to develop this biomarker into a diagnostic test for routine use in diagnostic workups, which may enable doctors to identify glioblastoma patients who could benefit from targeted treatments now under development. Glioblastoma is the most common and aggressive form of primary brain tumor, a serious unmet medical need because the disease is generally fatal despite aggressive therapy. Fusions between members of the FGFR and TACC gene families also have been identified recently as present in several other malignancies, including bladder cancers.

Five top Japanese drug companies are to open their “libraries” of experimental compounds to scrutiny by scientists hunting new treatments for malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases affecting the world’s poor.

The initiative, announced on Thursday, is the first project under a new $100 million partnership between the drugmakers, the Japanese government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund research into neglected tropical diseases.