Northeast Ohio entrepreneur, Wayne Urban, has done his homework for a couple of years to get this medical device invention off the ground. This truly home-spun, grassroots effort is introducing a product that fills a real need: a sling that holds up your leg when you’ve been injured and can’t stand on it. Makes a lot of sense to podiatrists.
As founder and CEO of his company, LS Products, LLC, Urban did all the investigative research to learn how to get the FDA approval, the manufacturer producing a prototype, etc. “We have demonstrated it, exhibited at medical tradeshows, been featured on TV, and been written up in newspapers. We are adding several sales reps, but we feel we need to reach many more people now,” says Urban.
What better way than to connect through the companies of NEOBio and beyond. Check out their website.
This is really cool. A new stent that can be put in during angioplasty has been designed to prevent the troubling re-narrowing of arteries that seemed always to happen after the procedure. It’s coated with a drug that prevents the restinosis.
Fewer people living additional healthier years without having to have their chests cut open…that’s what the promise of bioscience is about.
The federal government last year distributed $30 billion for highways, $75 billion for weapons systems, and $26 billion for medical research, says a Boston Globe article. Looks like among places to put money that generate local jobs, commerce, and taxes, curing disease comes in last.
Tomorrow Purdue University is hosting a full-day conference-that’s totally free and open to the public–on how bioscience and nanotechnology can be linked. Speakers from Purdue, Northwestern and U of I will talk about current research and discuss how universities can network on this subject.
Oh, and it’s got some heavy-hitter sponsors: Purdue’s Bindley Bioscience Center, Birck Nanotechnology Center, the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (funded by the National Science Foundation), and the Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing (funded by NASA).
The CEO of Eppendorf, which is based in Hamburg, Germany, gave these reasons for the choice: “The Enfield site is closer to the company’s markets, has certain unspecified logistical advantages and less exposure to fluctuations in the currency exchange rate.”
Researchers have found a delivery method for gene therapy that reaches all the voluntary muscles of a mouse – including heart, diaphragm and limbs – and reverses the process of muscle-wasting found in muscular dystrophy. Delivered by simple injection, the virus goes only for muscle cells and does not trigger the immune system. Results will appear in the August issue of Nature Medicine.
SCAR, the Society for Computer Applications in Radiology, research grants are open to residents, fellows, and faculty in departments of diagnostic radiology, radiation oncology, or nuclear medicine, as well as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in imaging informatics or biomedical engineering. Residents, fellows, and students must conduct their projects under the guidance of experienced investigators. Recipients do a paper that might be presented at the SCAR Annual Meeting and published in the Journal of Digital Imaging.
Paragon Medical, Inc., a medical-device supplier, is undertaking a $50 million expansion that’s expected to provide 300 jobs within five years and boost job prospects in northeast Indiana. The maker of surgical instruments, implantable components and instrument delivery systems for medical device manufacturers in hip, knee, spine, trauma and sports medicine sells directly to orthopedic equipment manufacturers such as Johnson & Johnson and Zimmer.
With about 300 workers at its 110,000-square-foot Pierceton operation, this sounds like a company worth investigating…
If you’re in the business of marketing for the healthcare industry (if you own a medical device or other type of bioscience company, this could be valuable), and your budget can bear a $5700 hit, here’s a class for you, “Strategic Marketing for the Health Care Industry.” The promo says: “Learn innovative strategies, insights, and methods for exceptional results in healthcare marketing…”
Sounds a bit like a crash-MBA course for medical marketers (though it’s clearly a prohibitively expensive proposition for a startup or smaller enterprise). It’s brought to you by The Medical Marketing Association (MMA) in combination with the Health Industry Management Program at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management.
The course will be held at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL this September 19-24.
One of the big services MMA offers members is the ability to post unlimited numbers of jobs to its website. And there’s the hope–that your company keeps growing and keeps needing to hire more people. Membership is around $200.
England’s National Health Service (free medical care to all) may get some competition from–surprise–outsourcing to India. Some English companies are considering exporting services such as testing and analyzing blood and urine samples, while some English citizens are finding they can get less expensive, faster in-person services such as surgical procedures (and that’s with airfare included). Some are reporting that the medical staff are nicer there, too.
What lessons can the bioscience community learn from outsourcing that other businesses are learning? Is the fragile nature of any new-to-midlife company similar to the fragile personal economy of the individual consumer–who is both personally attracted by WalMart-esque lower prices and yet in the bigger picture often hurt by the loss of jobs they represent? What are the alternatives to crying foul? How else can we think about this trend? Because as sure as there’s an Internet, the trend’s unstoppable.
Looking at how bioscience news affects business, higher education, government – and you and me