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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Happy Holidays 2011
Science Business is taking a break today, but we’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s a Chanukah video from my niece and nephew Dafna and Adam, with their two little girls providing the dance moves. Enjoy your holidays. * * *
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Baxter, Momenta to Partner on Biosimilars
Pharmaceutical and medical device maker Baxter International and biotechnology company Momenta Pharmaceuticals have agreed to collaborate on development of follow-on biologic drugs, also known as biosimilars. The deal valued at at least $33 million is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012. Under the agreement, Baxter in Deerfield, Illinois, will make an up-front…
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Biotech Lands $30 Million Late Stage Investment
Acceleron Pharma Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts says it raised $30 million in private financing from its current investors and one of its drug development partners. The funds, says Acceleron, will advance its clinical stage drug pipeline, as well as its overall research agenda. The company develops therapies based on the transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta)…
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Apple Files Patent Applications for Fuel Cell Power
Apple Inc. in Cupertino, California has filed two U.S. patent applications for building fuel cell systems into the power supplies used in their electronic devices. The patent applications were reported yesterday on the Web site AppleInsider. One invention outlines a fuel cell system to directly power a portable electronic device. In this system, a fuel…
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Energy Dept to Fund R&D on Vehicle Charging Stations
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) announced grants totaling some $7 million for research and development to help improve the performance and flexibility of electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s power grids. The funds will go to electric vehicle (EV) charging station manufacturers in California, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, who are expected to…
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Patent Awarded for Stem Cell Generation Process
A process that enables a single gene to generate millions of therapeutic stem cells from ordinary human cells has received a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent — number 8,080,420 — was awarded to medical professor Kiminobu Sugaya and colleagues at University of Central Florida in Orlando, and assigned to that…