The Bio Report

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the Gladstone Institutes have grown beating cardiac tissue from stem cells in work that may lead to new ways to quickly screen for drugs likely to cause birth defects in the heart and identify drugs that may be dangerous during pregnancy. We spoke to Bruce Conklin, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease,...

For many patients with rare and difficult to diagnose conditions, it can take many years and many doctors to find a correct answer. CrowdMed is trying to offering an alternative to patients by allowing them to tap the wisdom of crowds and letting medical detectives who sign on to the site try to find the right answer. We spoke to Jared Heyman, founder and CEO of CrowdMed, about the problem with th...

Last year, the biotechnology industry set records across the board for financial metrics, a reflection of product success, new drug approvals, and free-flowing investment capital. Despite the record performance, concerns continue about growing pricing pressure and maturing pipelines that represent challenges with which the industry must contend. We spoke to Glen Giovannetti, EY’s Global Life Scien...

A detailed view of funding of emerging therapeutic companies over the past ten years shows despite a rebound in venture financing, companies continue to struggle to find early-stage money. Nevertheless, the report shows the overall health of investment in the sector is thriving. We spoke to Dave Thomas, senior director of industry research and analysis for the Biotechnology Industry Organization a...

To improve the long-term value of biopharmaceutical companies, management should learn to think more like activist investors, according to a new report from EY. The report argues that capital allocation and strategic decision-making could benefit from company leaders setting aside their assumptions and challenging themselves by thinking more like outsiders. We spoke to Jeff Greene, Global Life Sci...

Bernard Muller was a successful businessman in the maritime and oil industry, but when he was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease ALS in 2010, he turned his entrepreneurial skills toward developing new therapies to treat the disease. Muller co-founded the world’s largest genetic research project for ALS, project MinE, and launched Treeway, a biotech company developing new therapies for AL...

Sleep researchers and clinicians will be gathering in Seattle June 6 - 10 for SLEEP 2015, a joint meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society. It is the largest gathering of sleep medicine physicians, sleep and circadian researchers, and health professionals in the sleep field. We spoke to Chris Winter, a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and a b...

Wall Street’s attention will turn to Chicago as the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology runs from May 29 to June 2. Some 5,000 abstracts became available mid-month and investors have been sifting through them to gain insights into which drugmakers will rise and fall on news from the meeting. We spoke to Adam Feuerstein, senior columnist for TheStreet, about the ASCO meeting...

A recent article in Nature Chemical Biology that shows it is possible to convert sugar into morphine with genetically engineered yeast has sparked public attention over the potential illicit use of the technology and the need for regulation. The work, though, also opens up significant possibilities for producing a wide range of drugs and the discovery of new ones to treat everything from cancer to...

Universities are moving away from a passive approach to technology transfer to engage with industry in new partnerships, put a greater emphasis on translational research, and nurturing technologies so they can give rise to new products and companies. We spoke to Eric Tomlinson, chief innovation officer of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, about these changes, the approach Wake Forest is taking,...

With the mapping of the human microbiome, a new understanding is emerging of the complex relationship between the microorganisms that live in the human gut, skin, and elsewhere on the body, and the role they play both in disease and in maintaining health. Along with growing concerns about drug resistant bacteria, this is giving rise to opportunities for narrow spectrum antibiotics. We spoke to Dav...

AgeneBio is developing drugs to treat the pre-dementia stage of Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurological and psychiatric conditions. The company announced encouraging mid-stage results for its lead therapeutic, which works by quieting hyperactivity in the hippocampus portion of the brain, which plays a critical role in the formation of memory. We spoke to Jerry McLaughlin, CEO of AgeneBio about...

In April, the IMS Institute released a new report that U.S. drug spending in 2014 rose 13.1 percent to $373.9 billion, the largest single year increase in spending since 2001. A number of factors drove the increase including the launch of innovative new therapies such as Gilead’s hepatitis C drug Sovaldi. We spoke to Murray Aitken, executive director of IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, ab...

AARP, the advocacy group serving people over the age of 50, is taking steps to ensure that digital health technologies best serve its membership. The organization has embarked on an initiative to test the design and functionality of digital health devices for older people and provide feedback to the marketplace. It’s enlisted partners United Healthcare and Pfizer as part of its effort. We spoke to...

A newly discovered archive of documents reveal the sugar industry’s efforts to shape the national research agenda away from the effects of sugar on tooth decay and push for programs to focus on alternatives to reducing consumption. We spoke to Cristin Kearns, a University of California, San Francisco postdoctoral scholar who discovered the papers, about her research, how the agenda of the National...

Drug resistant bacteria cause 2 million illnesses and approximately 23,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The problem of resistance also limits the ability to treat patients using certain medical procedures, such as chemotherapy, surgery, and organ transplants. Last week, the Obama Administration released its National Action...

Adverse events from drugs cost the U.S. healthcare system an estimated $25 billion in 2013, but data from adverse events reporting is generally not factored into payer and provider decisions about what drugs are most cost-effective. The healthcare analytics firm AdverseEvents is trying to change that by turning adverse events data gathered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration into actionable i...

Tomasz Sablinski believes the drug development process is broken and has sought to reinvent it. His company, Transparency Life Sciences, relies on crowdsourcing to design its clinical trials, makes all of its data public, and employs digital technologies to remotely monitor participants and dramatically reduce the costs of studies. Now, several years into his efforts, we checked in with Sablinski,...

The biopharmaceutical industry has long been considered immune to the threat of patent trolls, patent holders who seek to monetize the value of a patent through enforcement rather than productive use. But a paper by UC Hastings Robin Feldman and Harvard Fellow Nicholson Price argues that the biopharmaceutical industry should be worried and that steps should be taken now to counter the threat befor...

A first of its kind study of venture investment in therapeutics by disease area and innovation finds that venture investment following the Great Recession has not yet recovered to the levels seen in the years leading up to the financial crisis. In addition, the study shows great disparities in the level of funding of disease categories and finds that chronic diseases with large patient populations...

At the end of January, after nearly a year of hearings, roundtables, and white papers, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health released a draft of the much anticipated 21st Century Cures Act. The draft, nearly 400 pages long, addresses a broad range of issues in the drug and device development and review process. We spoke to Nick Manetto, principal with the national adviso...

There’s no shortage of data created in the world of healthcare, but harnessing it to improve care and reduce costs remains a challenge. Apervita, backed with $18 million recent venture investment from GE Ventures, Baird Capital, and others is a marketplace for people to buy and sell their healthcare analytics. We spoke to Paul Magelli, CEO of Apervita, about the pressures on healthcare providers t...

President Obama unveiled the details of his $215 million precision medicine initiative, the centerpiece of which is a 1 million person study that seeks to correlate genetic data, with health records, lifestyle information, and more to better understanding wellness and disease and fuel the development of new therapies. We spoke to Amy Miller, executive vice president of The Personalized Medicine Co...

CAR-T cell immunotherapies seek to harness the body’s immune system to fight tumor cells. The promise of this new class of therapies has ignited investor’s imaginations, but a new report from EP Vantage argues that the enthusiasm that has driven valuations of CAR-T companies should be tempered by an eye towards the risks. We spoke to Jacob Plieth, report author and senior reporter for EP Vantage,...

Investment in biomedical research in the United States is declining at a time when other countries have been increasing their spending. While this is raising concerns about the threats this poses to the nation’s economic competitiveness, a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests new strategies will be necessary to fund research and development if the clinical value of...