Company news

Anagin LLC, a company started last year by Indiana University researchers, won the BioCrossroads new venture competition for its plans to develop drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The $25,000 prize from BioCrossroads, an Indianapolis-based life sciences business development group, comes in addition to a $692,706 grant from the National Institutes of Health. Anagin was co-founded by Dr. Anantha Shekhar, a psychiatrist at the IU School of Medicine in Indianapolis, and Yvonne Lai, a scientist in IU’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in Bloomington. Anagin is trying to develop drugs that block PTSD without causing common side effects such as irritability, sexual dysfunction, addiction, and memory and motor-skill problems. Along with its BioCrossroads prize and NIH grant, Anagin will receive $50,000 in matching funds from state-funded Elevate Ventures.

Activate Healthcare LLC, an Indianapolis-based workplace health clinic operator, plans to expand its local operations, adding as many as 203 employees over the next nine years. Activate said it will spend $656,080 to lease a 3,400-square-foot office at 9302 N. Meridian St., more than tripling the size of its existing headquarters. The company operates 22 primary health care clinics in the Midwest, including 18 in Indiana that offer care to more than 40,000 patients. The clinics are within or near workplaces. The Indiana Economic Development Corp. said it offered the company $3.9 million in conditional tax credits and up to $200,000 in training grants based on the firm’s job-creation plans. Activate has about 110 full-time Indiana workers, but its base employment will be considered 84, according to the incentives agreement reached with IEDC. That means the company will need to have 287 employees by the end of 2023 to fully comply with the contract.

Eli Lilly and Co. will close one of its three manufacturing facilities in Puerto Rico at the end of 2015, according to the Associated Press. The Indianapolis company said it is closing its Guayama facility because the patents on some of the drugs made there have expired. Lilly intends to sell the Guayama plant. Lilly said the 100 employees who work there will be offered jobs at another of its facilities on the island, which are in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Guayama is in the southeastern part of Puerto Rico, and Carolina is in the northeast. Lilly has announced $240 million in investments in its Carolina facilities since late 2013.

The Indiana Medicaid program will receive more than $181,000 from a fraud settlement struck by states’ attorneys general and the federal government with the drug manufacturer Organon Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. According to The Statehouse File, the settlement resolves whistleblower allegations that Organon underpaid rebates to the state, offered improper financial incentives to nursing home pharmacies, promoted two of its antidepressants for unapproved uses, and misrepresented its drug prices to the Indiana Medicaid program to reap larger margins and increased sales. Organon, which is now owned by New Jersey-based Merck & Co. Inc., will pay $31 million to settle the lawsuits with the states and the federal government. Of that, Indiana Medicaid will receive $162,346 in a settlement arising from a whistleblower lawsuit filed in Massachusetts and $19,016 in a settlement arising from another whistleblower suit filed in Texas.