Month: July 2015
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Global Threat Identification Methods Sought in Challenge
24 July 2015. A new challenge on InnoCentive is seeking techniques for identifying climatic events in one region that have direct or indirect impacts elsewhere in the world. The competition has a total purse of $30,000 and deadline for submissions of 17 September 2015. InnoCentive in Waltham, Massachusetts conducts open-innovation, crowdsourcing competitions for corporate and…
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Research, Finance Alliance to Fast-Track Alzheimer’s Drugs
24 July 2015. A coalition of research institute, venture capital firm, and drug discovery company is forming a new enterprise to develop therapy candidates for Alzheimer’s disease from promising lab results. Financial terms of the partnership of Gladstone Institutes and Dolby Family Ventures in San Francisco with Evotec AG in Hamburg, Germany were not disclosed.…
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Cancer Specialists Offer Plan to Reduce Drug Prices
23 July 2015. A group of 118 cancer specialists proposed steps to reduce the cost of drugs to cancer patients, calling the current system of drug pricing “unsustainable and not affordable for many patients.” Their recommendations appear today in a commentary published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Pharmaceutical industry representatives, however, say drugs play…
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Dental Implants Found Prone to Fractures
22 July 2015. A review of manufactured dental implants discarded because of bone loss in the jaw of their wearers, indicates more than 6 in 10 of the devices had cracks or similar mechanical defects. The findings from the study by Keren Shemtov-Yona, a dentist and engineering doctoral student at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in…
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Cough Diagnostics Mobile App in Clinical Trial
22 July 2015. A smartphone app designed to diagnose the nature of a cough by the sound it makes is now being tested in a clinical trial in Australia. The app, developed in the lab of engineering professor Udantha Abeyratne at University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia was licensed to a spin-off company from the…
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Alliance to Collect Mobile Health Data for Clinical Trials
21 July 2015. A partnership between health technology companies developing cloud-based solutions aims to make it easier to collect data from a wide range of mobile apps for clinical studies. Financial aspects of the agreement between digital health platform company Validic and clinical research technology company Medidata were not disclosed. Validic, in Durham, North Carolina,…
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Trial Shows Engineered T-Cells Act on Multiple Myeloma
21 July 2015. An early-stage clinical trial shows immune system cells from patients with the blood-related cancer multiple myeloma — modified to attack a protein suspected of helping the cancer grow — generated a positive clinical response in most of the participants. The team from University of Pennsylvania cancer center, University of Maryland medical school,…
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Navy Seeks Graphene Nanoribbons for Electricity Distribution
20 July 2015. The U.S. Navy wants a more efficient way to distribute electric power on its ships, and believes ultrathin ribbons made of graphene may help them do it. The Office of Naval Research awarded an $800,000 grant to the lab led by engineering professor Cemal Basaran at University at Buffalo to find out more…
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Early Test Shows Alzheimer’s Candidate Lowers Brain Deposits
20 July 2015. A drug developed to treat Alzheimer’s disease reduced a large percentage of accumulated harmful peptides and proteins in brains of laboratory mice induced with the disorder. Results of the tests were reported today by the biotechnology company Treventis Corp. in Philadelphia, developer of the drug code-named TRV-101. Alzheimer’s disease is progressive neurodegenerative…
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Drug Delivery Biotech Raises $101.8 Million in IPO
17 July 2015. Chiasma Inc., a biotechnology enterprise developing oral therapies to replace injected drugs, raised some $101.8 million in its initial public stock offering. The company — located in Newton, Massachusetts and Jerusalem, Israel — issued 6,365,000 shares at $16.00, and trades on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol CHMA. Shares in the company closed…