Holding place for old articles.
She sent her first tweet just after noon, and already Kathleen Sebelius (@Sebelius) has 2,000-plus followers.
The secretary of U.S. Health and Human Services is the latest federal health official to join Twitter and follows in the footsteps of colleagues Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrFriedenCDC), the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Francis Collins (@NIHDirector), director of the National Institutes of Health.
Johns Hopkins University generally does well on U.S. rankings of the top colleges.
But how does it stack up against institutions of higher learning from around the world? Not bad. It ranks No. 19 in the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings of the top 100 universities from around the globe. The University of Maryland, College Park also comes up on the list, at 95.
Montgomery County-based Novavax is a biopharmaceutical company creating nanoparticle vaccines targeting a wide array of infectious diseases. In this new video, CEO Stanley Erck speaks about the different processes Novavax scientists are working on, and the overall momentum of the company. Mr. Erck also highlights the company’s partnerships with Path, LG Life Sciences, GE Healthcare, and Cadila Pharmaceuticals. Novavax is excited by the promising new data from clinical trials with its RSV vaccine candidate and pandemic influenza vaccine candidate, and by the potential of its technology platform. From discovery to commercialization, Novavax is positioned to develop the vaccines for tomorrow.
A tax measure that would create a new, more lenient capital gains rate for tech investors and entrepreneurs cashing out their stock in the District is “going to be a focal point” for the Gray administration’s policy efforts this year, Mayor Vincent Gray told me in an interview Friday.
Gray, discussing his upcoming trip to the South by Southwest technology competition in Texas and his broader efforts to expand the District’s tech startup scene, acknowledged that resistance to the tax cut persists in the D.C. Council, which tabled the tax break last summer:
“I don’t get the sense that they’re any further along,” he said.
Washington, D.C., is known for its cut-throat politics and its power players.
What many do not know is that D.C. is now a hub for business innovation.
Nevro Corp., a medical device company focused on improving pain relief in patients suffering from debilitating chronic pain, today announced it has completed a $48 million Series C financing round. The round was led by new investor Novo Ventures, joined by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Covidien Ventures. Existing investors participating in this financing round included Accuitive Medical Ventures (AMV), Bay City Capital, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (JJDC), Mayo Clinic, MPM Capital, and Three Arch Partners.
“We are excited to welcome premier investors Novo Ventures, NEA, and Covidien Ventures who share Nevro’s vision to be a leader in neuromodulation through continuous innovation”
Personal Genome Diagnostics Inc. (PGDx), a pioneer in conducting patient-specific analyses aimed at identifying genomic alterations in tumors, today announced a number of developments that will support its expanding business. The company licensed exclusive rights to Digital Karyotyping (DK), an important genome-mapping technology developed by the company’s founders at Johns Hopkins University. PGDx also announced that it is expanding into new facilities and has made a number of key hires, including Genzyme Oncology executive Antony Newton as Chief Commercial Officer.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has submitted its albiglutide once-weekly injection for type 2 diabetes to European regulators.
If approved the biologic treatment, which was submitted for US approval in January, will be marketed as Eperzan.
Albiglutide is, along with lupus treatment Benlysta and heart disease drug darapladib, one of a trio of drugs GSK has developed with Human Genome Sciences.
Personalized medicine — the ability to tailor therapies to patients’ individual genetic characteristics — has long been the holy grail of the life sciences industry. The effort has produced a string of recent successes, including a host of drugs targeted to people with specific genetic profiles, the European approval of the world’s first gene therapy treatment, and a much-heralded leukemia treatment pioneered at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) that uses tweaked versions of patients’ own cells to eliminate their cancer. While these advances are certainly exciting for patients, they raise a host of ethical, legal and financial challenges that people working in the field will need to address before personalized medicine can become a thriving business.
The challenges are so great, contends Wharton health care management professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel, that claims of a renaissance in medicine brought on by individualized approaches often seem hyperbolic. “Before we buy into this, we need to remember that almost every evaluation of what drives health care costs up points to new technologies,” says Emanuel, who is also a professor of medical ethics and health policy at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. “We need to be skeptical. We need to see the data before people buy into the idea that personalized medicine is going to produce cost savings and be so much better for the system.”
The University of Maryland, College Park has cracked the top 100 global reputation ranking by a publication based in the United Kingdom, The Washington Post reported.
Times Higher Education shows that UMd. is in a group ranked 91-100, in a class with Monash University in Australia, Lund in Sweden, Bristol in the U.K., the Free University of Berlin and Texas A&M. The rankings were based on surveys of academics around the world. Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, ranked No. 19, the highest from the local region. Harvard University was ranked No. 1.
