Holding place for old articles.
The National Institutes of Health is making available approximately $3.7 million for awards to enhance training opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to prepare them for careers in the biomedical research workforce that could take them outside of conventional academic research.
The first set of NIH Director’s Broadening Experience in Scientific Training (BEST) awards are supported through the NIH Common Fund’s Strengthening the Biomedical Research Workforce program.
Anyone can have a great business idea, and now students don’t have to be enrolled in the business school to get help making their ideas a success. This semester, the business school’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship expanded its Innovation Fridays program to reach students of all majors. The program, which used to be advertised only to business school students, gives student entrepreneurs free consultations with successful business owners to get advice for starting their own small businesses, promoting social causes or creating new technology.
University of Maryland, Baltimore and MedImmune are pairing up for a five-year, $6 million collaboration on bioscience research.
The Gaithersburg-based drug company and the university will both put money and scientists toward joint research projects. The projects will focus on medical conditions and diseases in MedImmune’s wheelhouse, such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory problems and inflammation.
The success of MenAfriVac shows vaccines can be developed outside Big Pharma’s walls, but, in most cases, the cost of late-phase trials is too great for charities. Recognizing this, JPMorgan Chase and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have set up a Big Pharma-backed investment fund.
GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK), Merck ($MRK) and Pfizer’s ($PFE) foundation are among the investors in the fund, which will back late-stage development of technologies to fight disease in low-income countries. Having raised $94 million from its initial backers, the Global Health Investment Fund (GHIF) will now start trying to give vaccines and other technologies the financial clout to navigate Phase III trials.
The National Institutes of Health has launched a major initiative to improve how basic science advances and discoveries are translated into commercially viable products that improve patient care and advance public health.
The NIH Centers for Accelerated Innovations (NCAIs), funded by the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), will target technologies to improve the diagnosis, treatment, management, and prevention of heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders and diseases.
Venture capital for early-stage medical device companies is drying up. At Advamed 2013, I was able to sit down and talk to Paul Grand, managing director at Research Corporation Technologies Ventures, a life sciences firm focused primarily on medical devices. When I asked him what the three main mistakes startups make when pitching him, he sighed. His first response: “Only three?”
Ouch. So be sure to avoid these blunders when pitching VCs, startup CEOs:
With the enforcement of the HIPAA Omnibus final rule starting this week, health IT companies face liability for breaches of patients’ protected health information that they may never have faced before. It’s also making issues like Bring Your Own Device even mores stressful for CIOs as they figure out how to make any instances of PHI on these devices secure enough to withstand an audit if the devices get lost or stolen. Although the strategy is not without risks, providers and payers are turning to cloud-based solutions from data security companies to ensure HIPAA compliance.
Here are a few health IT companies taking this approach. Their data security measures are designed to help providers serving as covered entities and HIT companies who are business associates comply with HIPAA.
Covidien President and CEO Joe Almeida said in a little more than a decade, sub-Saharan Africa could be the big opportunity for medical device companies’ solution investments.
“It is a 10- or 15-year play. . . . The middle class will rise and you will have an opportunity,” Almeida said during the CEOs Unplugged series at Advamed 2013.
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:
NIH Guide Notices (NOT):
Requests for Applications (RFAs):
Program Announcements (PA):
At Rock Health, entrepreneurs are developing innovative products to keep us healthier, and lower medical care costs.
Ten health startups in Rock Health’s current accelerator class presented to a roomful of investors and the press today. Rock Health is a startup accelerator that focuses on health care technology.
The current class of startups are tackling huge challenges in health care, such as cancer treatment or eating disorders.
