Science and Enterprise

Month: December 2011

  • Top 10 Science Business Stories for 2011

    In the spirit of David Letterman, Science Business offers its very own top 10 list, in this case the most viewed stories in 2011. During the year, Science Business received some 43,000 visits from 37,000 visitors, for which we are deeply grateful and humbled. Here are the 10 individual stories that got the most attention…

  • Emergent BioSolutions, Abbott Labs End Collaboration

    As reported yesterday, Emergent BioSolutions Inc. in Rockville, Maryland has started a phase 2 clinical study of its drug candidate TRU-016, a program conducted in partnership with pharmaceutical manufacturer Abbott Laboratories. Emergent BioSolutions now says that Abbott Laboratories has ended the partnership agreement to develop and commercialize the compound. Daniel J. Abdun-Nabi, president of Emergent…

  • Biofuels Start-Up Adds BP as Investor

    Cool Planet BioFuels in Camarillo, California says BP Technology Ventures has made an investment in the company’s C round — the third series of equity investments after start up. The amount of the investment by BP’s venture capital division was not disclosed. Current investors in Cool Planet Biofuels also include General Electric, Google Ventures, ConocoPhillips,…

  • Global Semiconductor Investment Drops in November

    A report from the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) shows investment in semiconductor companies worldwide dropped for the month of November 2011 compared to the same month in 2010, and for the year-to-date. The number of mergers and acquisitions in the industry also decreased for the year so far, but in November a number of new…

  • Student Project Develops Bacteria-Based Glucose Sensor

    A team of Missouri University of Science and Technology students in Rolla developed a sensor based on genetically modified E. coli bacteria to detect glucose levels. The students, members of the university’s chapter of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) Foundation, developed the system as part of an annual competition sponsored by iGEM, receiving a…

  • Clinical Trial to Test Leukemia Drug Combination [UPDATED]

    UPDATE, 29 December 2011: Emergent Biosolutions, Abbott Labs End Collaboration Emergent BioSolutions Inc. in Rockville, Maryland has started a phase 2 clinical study of its drug candidate TRU-016 in combination with the chemotherapy drug bendamustine for patients with relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The company is developing TRU-016 in a partnership with Abbott Laboratories. Chronic…

  • Industry Consortium to Fund Fracturing Pollution R&D

    A consortium of businesses, universities, and national labs has made funds available for research on technologies to address environmental and safety concerns of hydraulic fracturing — a.k.a. fracking — methods to extract natural gas from shale rock. The $35 million in funding from the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA) is now open…

  • NIH Establishes Medical Translational Science Center

    The federal 2012 fiscal year spending bill passed by Congress and signed by President Obama before Christmas includes approval for National Institutes of Health (NIH) to form a new research center devoted to turning discoveries in the lab into new drugs, diagnostics, and devices. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), with a budget…

  • U.S. Patent Granted for Soft Tissue Reconstruction Implant

    The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a patent to Novus Scientific in Singapore for a resorbable mesh implant to be used in the reconstruction of soft tissue defects. The patent — number 8,083,755 — covers the mesh implant material that breaks down and is assimilated back into the body. Novus Scientific developed the…

  • Software Speeds Database Sequence Searches

    Computational biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany have developed software that makes possible a new search method to identify proteins in databases with similar genomic sequences. The software that the developers say is faster and can discover twice as many evolutionarily related proteins as previous methods, is described online in the journal Nature…