Science and Enterprise

Month: January 2012

  • Columbia Joins Coulter Biomedical Engineering Partnership

    Columbia University in New York and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation in Miami will establish the Columbia-Coulter Translational Research Partnership, part of a network of biomedical engineering and translational research institutions in the U.S. The program is expected devote $5 million in funding over five years, with two-thirds of the funds from the Coulter Foundation,…

  • Medical Sensor Powered by Music Vibrations Developed

    Engineers at Purdue University in Indiana have developed a miniature medical sensor that can be powered by vibrations from music played nearby, with the deep bass of rap music found most effective. The research conducted in the lab of Babak Ziaie, professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering, will be presented at the…

  • NIH Trials to Assess Emergency Cardiac Arrest Treatments

    NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has begun two clinical trials to evaluate treatments for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: – A comparison of continuous chest compressions (CCC) combined with pause-free rescue breathing, to standard cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) that includes a combination of chest compressions and pauses for rescue breathing, and – Treatment with the drug…

  • $250K Challenge Seeks Post-Hospital Care Ideas

    Janssen Healthcare Innovation, a unit of pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson in San Diego, is offering a challenge with a total of $250,000 in awards for technology solutions to improve the care for patients discharged from the hospital. The Janssen Connected Care Challenge was announced today by Kimberly Park, a Janssen Healthcare Innovation partner, at the…

  • Faster, More Sensitive Flu Diagnostics Developed

    Researchers at the RIKEN Omics Science Center in Yokohama, Japan have developed a new technique to identify influenza virus infection in only 40 minutes and with 100 times the sensitivity of conventional methods. The findings from the team led by RIKEN Omics’ Toshihisa Ishikawa appear in the online journal PLoS ONE. Ishikawa and his colleagues…

  • Celgene to Acquire Avila Therapeutics

    The pharmaceutical company Celgene Corp. in Summit, New Jersey says it will acquire Avila Therapeutics, a biotechnology company in Bedford, Massachusetts. Celgene discovers and commercializes therapies for the treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases through gene and protein regulation. Avila develops covalent drugs, those that bind to and inhibit disease-causing proteins. Under the agreement, Celgene…

  • NSF Supporting Research to Reduce Fertilizer Use in Maize

    Researchers at three universities, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and USDA’s Agricultural Research Service have received a $1.3 million grant from National Science Foundation for research on reducing the amount of fertilizer to grow maize. The three-year project is led by the ARS’s Ivan Baxter, who also serves on the Danforth Center’s faculty in…

  • Grant to Fund New Program Logic for Flight Data Integration

    A grant from the U.S. Air Force to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York will fund development of computer logic to help create safer and more efficient flight technology. The $100,00 grant was awarded to computer scientist Carlos Varela of Rensselaer’s Data Science Research Center, who is also a licensed pilot (pictured right). Varela’s…

  • Dutch Biotech Raises $30M for Rare Disease Therapies

    Prosensa, a biopharmaceutical company in Leiden, the Netherlands, says it has raised €23 million ($30 million) in new equity financing. The company develops therapeutics using ribonucleic acid (RNA) modulation to address rare diseases, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, myotonic dystrophy, and Huntington’s disease. The funding round is led by New Enterprise Associates in Menlo Park, California,…

  • Lab Discovers Material to Help Process Spent Nuclear Fuel

    Research chemists at Sandia National Lab in Albuquerque have developed a new material that can capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. The team led by Tina Nenoff (pictured right) published their findings recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society; paid subscription required. The Sandia researchers, with colleagues from Argonne…