News Archive

Site Selection for Life Sciences Companies,” a report released this month by business intelligence firm Venture Valuation and KPMG, uses an agglomeration of other reports and proprietary data to analyze key decision factors relevant to the leading life sciences clusters in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK.

Why those territories? The authors say those countries are often preferred by foreign companies seeking European or global headquarters. But depending on which factors are emphasized and how they’re weighted, any of the six might stand above the rest.

GrayBug, LLC, a company that focuses on the development of innovative injectable drug delivery systems to more effectively treat eye diseases, has announced the appointment of Michael O’Rourke as President & CEO, as well as Board Member.

“I am excited to take on this leadership role at this pivotal point in GrayBug’s development,” said Mr. O’Rourke. “GrayBug has developed a unique approach to offer superior treatment options to patients through proprietary sustained release drug platforms. I look forward to working with the team at GrayBug to advance our lead product for the treatment of neovascular eye diseases including wet age-related macular degeneration (wet-AMD).”

To generate its list of the top 10 U.S. regions in which to secure a biotech job, GEN adopted a straightforward methodology. It identified the regions most frequently cited in biotechnology and pharmaceutical job listings. Over the past month, GEN collected data by scrutinizing five employment websites—LinkedIn, BioSpace, Medzilla, Indeed, and Monster.

The locales with the most biopharma-related jobs include the regular suspects—San Francisco and Boston—and also up and comers like the New York metropolitan area, which has grown steadily over the last few years.

BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) (NYSE:BDX), a leading global medical technology company, together with Direct Relief and the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), today launched BD Helping Build Healthy CommunitiesSM, a four-year initiative that will expand access and improve care for underserved and vulnerable populations in the U.S. The initiative, first announced earlier this year with a founding pledge at the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, includes a BD commitment of approximately $5 million in cash and product to clinics and community health centers (CCHCs) employing innovative models of care, along with strategic support from all

This is the start of the third year teaching teams of scientists (professors and their graduate students) in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps). This month we’ve crossed ~300 teams in the first two years through the program.

I-Corps is the accelerator that helps scientists bridge the commercialization gap between their research in their labs and wide-scale commercial adoption and use.

During his nine years working in the phar­ma­ceu­tical industry, Michael Pol­lastri learned to pro­tect his research and data with extreme cau­tion. “In the drug industry, every­thing is super secret,” said Pol­lastri, now an asso­ciate pro­fessor of chem­istry and chem­ical biology at North­eastern. “It’s the culture.”

But Pol­lastri said this secrecy model doesn’t work when it comes to curing infec­tious dis­eases such as African sleeping sick­ness and Chagas dis­ease, which affect the poorest mem­bers of the global com­mu­nity but are largely “neglected” by the industry. What’s more, “there’s not enough money going around to spend time on projects in which no one is sharing infor­ma­tion,” Pol­lastri said.

Gaithersburg-based GlycoMimetics Inc. set the terms for its upcoming IPO on Monday, planning to sell 4 million shares at between $14 and $16 apiece.

The biotech expects to list on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GLYC. It would be the third in an already active stretch for Maryland life sciences IPOs, following Intrexon Corp. and MacroGenics Inc. to the public markets.

DreamIt Health is a health tech accelerator that selects up to ten startups from around the world to take up residence in Baltimore, MD and achieve in four months what might otherwise take years. Attend the information session on November 6 to learn how you can be a part of the program that has launched 130 IT companies.

Nov 13, 2013 06:00pm

Join the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs and Women in Bio as we host a panel of life science leaders who will share insights from their experience commercializing technology. The discussion facilitated by Lynn Johnson Langer, PhD, MBA, Director, Enterprise & Regulatory Science Programs, Johns Hopkins University will cover:

• licensing strategies for patents;
• marketing strategies;
• fee structure and standards of care;
• regulatory challenges;
• stories of success and failure.

With mHealth becoming the norm instead of the exception, a panel at Partners HealthCare’s 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium last week concluded that EHR vendors will have to find a way to modify their products to focus on data that the patient and his or her care team want, or they’ll become obsolete.

Important information for a patient’s care actually exists outside the electronic medical record, panelists said.