LOPRESTI: Ready or not, new Pacers season awaits
It was a rough summer for the Blue & Gold. How could the regular season be worse?
It was a rough summer for the Blue & Gold. How could the regular season be worse?
The developing Ebola situation now has a Hoosier link, with the president’s appointment of Indianapolis native and North Central High School grad Ron Klain as Ebola response coordinator (in media parlance, Ebola czar).
A change in how eligibility for Medicaid is determined could save Indiana $26 million this fiscal year by pushing thousands of residents off coverage but providing first-time benefits to even more at lower costs.
It’s easy to get discouraged these days—to look at the overwhelming evidence of social and political dysfunction and retreat into Angry Old Person territory.
The Indiana Supreme Court has ruled that causes of death are public records and must be available at county levels.
The planned $20 million senior housing and retail project could help breathe new life into a blighted neighborhood that’s sorely in need of investment.
Medicare will reduce payments to 68 Indiana hospitals—a 62-percent increase from last year—for having too many patients return within 30 days.
St. Vincent Health will close its long-term acute hospital in Lafayette in the next two months, leaving as many as 83 workers without jobs. The Indianapolis-based hospital system stopped accepting new patients last week at Seton Specialty Hospital if they require stays of 25 days or longer. The facility will close after all current patients end their stays. St. Vincent officials said they would have had to find a new home for Seton because the campus where it leased space— Franciscan St. Elizabeth Health’s Central campus—moved its operations to the Franciscan St. Elizabeth Health’s East campus, also in Lafayette, last month. St. Vincent will continue to operate its other Seton Specialty Hospital in Indianapolis. The Seton Specialty Hospital in Indianapolis has been running at higher occupancy and posting larger profits than its counterpart in Lafayette, according to St. Vincent’s annual filings with the Indiana State Department of Health.
One of three experimental drugs in Eli Lilly and Co.’s push into autoimmune medicines has flamed out. Indianapolis-based Lilly said it would end development of its lupus drug after it failed in overall results generated by two Phase 3 trials in humans. Lilly gave the drug in two doses to patients and in one of the trials, the higher dose showed a statistically significant improvement in patients compared with those taking a placebo. But the lower dose did not. And in a second clinical trial, both doses failed to show a significant benefit versus placebo. Lilly will take an accounting charge in the third quarter of as much as $75 million before taxes. In August, Lilly announced that an autoimmune drug to treat psoriasis had shown marked improvement over an existing therapy, and that Lilly would submit it to regulators for approval. Lilly is also studying a third autoimmune drug to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Results from that drug are expected late this year or early next year.
Community Health Network received a $3.7 million grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to fund its early intervention program to prevent suicides among Hoosiers ages 10 to 24. Over the next five years, Community will use the federal money to work with 600 primary care physicians, 13 hospitals and 11 emergency departments around the state, offering them crisis services, psychiatry services provided over the Internet, and intensive care coordination. Those providers and facilities, some of which are part of Community’s health system, will serve 5,000 Hoosiers per year. Community will also work with schools, foster care agencies, juvenile justice programs, state government agencies and others to build a statewide crisis network of people trained to identify young people at risk of attempting suicide, provide timely intervention, and quickly connect them with Community’s crisis providers.
The First Time Offender Program will convert the Plainfield Short Term Offender Program into the Heritage Trail Correctional Facility and also offer addiction-recovery services, family and social support, mentoring and behavioral change programs.
Shelbyville’s Major will break ground on an $89 million hospital next month. Meanwhile, hospital systems around the state are talking about consolidating facilities or turning unused bed space to new uses.
Contract talks broke down Wednesday between Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and a network of five hospitals and other facilities, leaving tens of thousands of patients facing higher health insurance costs.
Amazon has been developing its own local services marketplace. Yelp is the leading consumer-review service in the retail space. Website Holding company IAC, meanwhile, has a big stash of cash and owns competitor HomeAdvisor.com.
Indianapolis Business Journal gathered leaders in the state's health care and benefits sector for a Power Breakfast panel discussion Sept. 26. The panel discussed disruption of employer clinics, health care spending and more.
Modern technology offers a way to deliver much-needed mental health care to rural sections of Indiana where little or none is available, experts told a legislative study committee Thursday.
A Purdue University startup is developing drugs that could reduce a neurotoxin believed to play a part in multiple sclerosis, neuropathic pain and Parkinson’s disease. Neuro Vigor LLC formed last year, based on the research of Riyi Shi, a Purdue professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering. The company is now trying to raise money to help it prepare for and conduct human trials of one of its drugs. Its drugs are designed to reduce the level of acrolein in patients’ brains. "Our preclinical research has shown by lowering acrolein we could much reduce the symptoms and pain of neurological diseases and injuries,” Shi said in a statement. He co-founded Neuro Vigor along with Mark Van Fleet, a senior executive with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and David Giddings, the former president of Boehringer Mannheim Corp.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved Dow AgroSciences LLC’s Enlist corn and soybean traits in the United States. Indianapolis-based Dow Agro now awaits action by the Environmental Protection Agency to register the companion herbicide to the Enlist traits, which is a new version of the 2,4-D weed killer that's been around since the 1940s. The EPA has said it will rule this fall on Indianapolis-based Dow AgroSciences' application to market the chemical. After the EPA acts, Dow Agro said, it will update its plans to bring Enlist to market in 2015. The agriculture industry has been anxiously awaiting the approvals, as many weeds have become resistant to glyphosate, a herbicide commonly used on corn and soybeans now. Dow Agro, which is a subsidiary of Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co., also formed a strategic research and development alliance last week with Greenfield-based Elanco Animal Health. The two companies will work to develop products that enable livestock producers to increase meat and milk production. Elanco, a subsidiary of Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co., was a co-founder of Dow Agro in 1989 but sold its stake to Dow Chemical in 1997.
Eli Lilly and Co. agreed to pay AstraZeneca plc as much as $500 million to jointly develop an experimental oral drug for Alzheimer’s, according to Bloomberg News. The two companies will work together to develop AZD3293, which belongs to a class of drugs called BACE inhibitors that block production of amyloid, a protein that causes plaque to build up in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients. The two companies will work to begin studies in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease. Lilly will lead clinical development while AstraZeneca will be responsible for manufacturing. London-based AstraZeneca will receive the first milestone payment of $50 million in the first half of 2015 and the companies will share equally all future costs and potential global revenue. Indianapolis-based Lilly had been developing its own BACE inhibitor, but it failed in clinical testing because of safety issues. The only drugs approved for Alzheimer’s merely ease symptoms for a few months while the debilitating brain disease progresses. Still, they generate more than $5 billion annually.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new injectable diabetes drug from Eli Lilly and Co. for adults with Type 2 diabetes, according to Bloomberg News. The drug, Trulicity, is part of a new class of medicines called GLP-1 agonists, which spur the pancreas to create extra insulin after meals. Indianapolis-based Lilly is counting on new drugs like Trulicity to replace falling revenue from blockbusters like the antidepressant Cymbalta, which is facing cheaper generic competition after the expiration of its patent. Analysts predict the drug could eventually bring in $700 million to as much as $1.3 billion annually in revenue. The drug will bear a boxed warning — the most serious type — highlighting that rats tested with Trulicity had cases of thyroid cancer, though it's unclear whether they were caused by the drug. Lilly will be required to conduct follow-up studies on cases of thyroid cancer, heart problems and other potential safety issues with the drug.
The farmers won't be able to take full advantage of the seeds until the EPA issues a second ruling allowing the use of weed killer Enlist. The EPA has said it will rule this fall on Indianapolis-based Dow AgroSciences' application to market the chemical.
Strong leadership is needed for the urban Indianapolis tech park to hit its high potential.