Industry news

Report: Med tech venture rounds upsized but more sparse in Q1

Stacy Lawrence / Fierce Medical Devices

Two of the three largest venture rounds in U.S. life science startups last quarter went to medical device companies. That's a bit of an unusual state of affairs for med tech--which sometimes has the reputation of getting investment in dribs and drabs to back tech that's none too innovative.

Q1 '16: Venture cash is still pouring into U.S. biotechs

John Carroll / FierceBiotech

Even as share prices and biotech valuations wilted under the glare of a savage bear market during the first quarter of the year, venture capital groups showed no signs of slowing down from last year’s torrid pace. A roundup of U.S. venture activity concluded that VCs invested $1.8 billion in biotech companies--just a rounding error short of the $1.81 billion total tracked for the same period a year ago.

World’s older population grows dramatically

U.S. National Institute of Health

The world’s older population continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. Today, 8.5 percent of people worldwide (617 million) are aged 65 and over. According to a new report, “An Aging World: 2015(link is external),”  this percentage is projected to jump to nearly 17 percent of the world’s population by 2050 (1.6 billion).

Siberian silver to fight viruses, bacteria and fungi

Marchmont Innovation News

Researchers at Tomsk Polytechnic (TPU), a leading university in Siberia, are developing a silver nanoparticles based medicinal solution called “Argovit,” which is believed to be equally effective against viruses, germs, and fungi. 

FDA urges companies to get on board with continuous manufacturing

Eric Palmer / FeircePharmaManufacturing

A handful of companies have done pioneering work with continuous manufacturing, the production process that is faster, cheaper and less prone to the kinds of manufacturing mess-ups that worry the FDA. Now that the FDA has for the first time approved a company switching production of a drug from batch to continuous manufacturing, the agency is inviting others to get on board with the process.  

Progress reviewed for new treatments that target osteoporosis

Peter Winter / BioWorld

The world's population is aging and that statistic means the incidence of chronic and serious life-threatening diseases is also on the rise. One of those conditions that challenge health care systems around the world is osteoporosis, a skeletal disease, which brings with it significant economic and health burdens.

A programming language for living cells

Anne Trafton / MIT News

MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells.

15 April 2016

Marinus Pharmaceuticals Receives FDA Orphan Drug Designation for Ganaxolone IV to Treat Status Epilepticus

Marinus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq:MRNS), a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of innovative therapeutics to treat epilepsy and neuropsychiatric disorders, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Orphan Drug Designation to the intravenous (IV) formulation of its CNS-selective GABAAmodulator, ganaxolone, for the treatment of status epilepticus. A Phase 1 clinical trial evaluating the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of ganaxolone IV is expected to initiate in the first half of 2016.

Clinical development: Overengineered, underengineered, just right?

Cormac Sheridan / BioWorld

The blame game is a favored industry pastime, and drug regulators were set up to get it in the neck on the final day of the DIA Europe meeting, in an Oxford-style debate on the motion: This house believes that overengineered clinical development has inhibited innovation.

U.S. docs know scarily little about the FDA process for new drugs

Ben Adams / FierceBiotech

The very people charged with prescribing medicines to patients don’t, as it turns out, know very much at all about how they are approved--and this may be leading them to over-prescribe new drugs.