Month: July 2013
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Renewable Biochemical Spin-Offs Land Small Business Grants
Two start-up companies, founded to commercialize research on renewable biochemicals at Iowa State University at Ames, received small business research grants from National Science Foundation to develop their technologies for the marketplace. The companies — OmegaChea Biorenewables in Ames and Glucan Biorenewables in St. Louis — are spin-off enterprises from Iowa State’s Center for Biorenewable Chemicals. OmegaChea Biorenewables,…
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Thin Illuminating Touch-Sensitive Electronic Film Developed
Engineers and materials scientists at University of California in Berkeley created an interactive electronic film with a network of pressure sensors built into flexible plastic. The findings from the lab of Berkeley engineering professor Ali Javey, with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, appear online in yesterday’s advance issue of the journal Nature Materials (paid…
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TB Diagnostics Developer Gains $1.5M in Early Financing
TB Biosciences, a biotechnology company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania developing genomics-based diagnostics for tuberculosis, received $1.5 million in its first fund-raising round after initial start-up. The financing was led by Bethlehem venture capital company Originate Ventures, joined by Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania and the NYU Innovation Venture Fund. Tuberculosis, or TB, is a…
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Safety Concerns Halt Celgene Leukemia Drug Trial
The biopharmaceutical company Celgene in Summitt, New Jersey is stopping a late-stage clinical trial of its cancer drug lenalidomide to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia due to the higher death rate of patients taking the drug. Lenalidomide is a small-molecule compound that regulates the immune system and marketed by Celgene under the brand name Revlimid. The…
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Venture Funding Down in 2Q, Health Companies Score in Exits
Venture capital (VC) funding of start-up companies in the U.S. continued its decline in the second quarter of 2013, but biotechnology start-ups figured prominently in gaining liquidity during that quarter. The data, compiled by the investment industry research service Dow Jones VentureSource, shows U.S. companies raised $7.2 billion in 801 deals during the second quarter, registering declines…
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Scripps Institute, Sigma-Aldrich to Partner on Reagents
Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California is collaborating with Sigma-Aldrich Corp. in St. Louis to speed the availability of new chemical reagents for drug discovery to the scientific community. The deal calls for payments to Scripps from Sigma-Aldrich, a chemical and laboratory services company, although the size of the payments is not disclosed. Under…
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Gold Nanoparticles Configured into Stretchable Conductors
Engineers and physicists at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor devised a method for transforming gold nanoparticles into conductive chains that stretch to nearly six times their original length and still conduct a current. The team led by Michigan chemical engineering professor Nicholas Kotov, with participants from the Korea Basic Science Institute in Daejeon, published…
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Research to Develop Peer-to-Peer VoIP Security Protocol
A computer science research group at University of Alabama in Birmingham is studying a new security scheme to better protect voice- and video-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications. The team led by Birmingham computer science professor Nitesh Saxena is funded by a two-year $150,000 grant from Cisco Systems. Saxena, with Birmingham computer science colleague Purushotham Bangalore, will…
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Smart Scalpel Tests Tissue for Cancer During Surgery
Medical technology researchers from Hungary and the U.K. developed a device that analyzes the smoke-like aerosol released during cancer electrosurgery to determine if the dissected tissue is cancerous. The team from Imperial College London led by medical faculty member Zoltán Takáts published its findings in today’s issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine (paid subscription…
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University Research Leads to Non-Toxic Insect Repellant
Research by an entomology professor at University of California in Riverside led to a company licensing his discoveries that announced its first product, a non-toxic patch that repels mosquitoes for 48 hours. Olfactor Laboratories, a company co-founded by and licensing the research of Anandasankar Ray, makes the Kite mosquito patch, which yesterday started a crowd-funding…