FERGUSON: Defunding sends states on dangerous path
Much more worrying to me is the fact that many of the poorest women (and men) in the state will be denied basic health services at least temporarily.
Much more worrying to me is the fact that many of the poorest women (and men) in the state will be denied basic health services at least temporarily.
Eli Lilly and Co. is getting into orthopedics. The Indianapolis-based drugmaker signed a deal with Swiss company Synthes Inc. to co-promote the bone drug Forteo to orthopedic surgeons and to license some experimental drugs to Synthes. The companies also will team up to study an additional use for Forteo in fracture healing. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Synthes specializes in developing and selling instruments, implants and biomaterials to fix bone and soft tissues. It has agreed to sell itself to New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson for $21 billion. In a separate development, Lilly won the first round in a court battle with another development partner, San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. A federal judge rejected Amylin’s claim that, if Lilly uses the same sales force to sell Byetta, a diabetes medicine made by Amylin, and Tradjenta, a diabetes pill made by Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, it would be anti-competitive. Amylin promised to appeal.
Three weeks after the CEO of Riley Hospital for Children resigned, his right-hand man announced his departure, too. Brett D. Lee, the chief operating officer at Riley, announced his plans June 8 to leave the Indianapolis hospital for a new job in Atlanta. His last day will be July 6. It’s not clear if Lee’s departure is connected to the May 20 resignation of Dan Fink, who had been CEO of Riley for about two years. Fink was replaced as CEO on an interim basis by Marilyn Cox, Riley’s chief nursing officer. Lee was considered a rising star at Riley, which is part of the Indianapolis-based Indiana University Health hospital system. Less than a year after being hired by Riley in April 2010, Lee was named the young health care executive of the year by the American College of Healthcare Executives, in part for his work applying Six Sigma and lean-process methods to the health care environment. Lee will become senior vice president of clinical operations at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the nation’s largest provider of pediatric care. It has three free-standing hospitals, with a total of 520 beds, as well as 17 outpatient facilities throughout the Atlanta metro area.
Carmel-based Woll Enterprises Inc. has won a contract to commercialize three medical products invented by two Florida physicians. Dr. Nevenka Horvat and Dr. Branimir Horvat, of Sarasota, Fla., have developed a medication for relief from psoriasis and eczema; a placental blood extractor; and a sequential lymphedema pump for removing excess fluid from swollen limbs. Woll Enterprises will try to locate funding to move the products toward market approval.
Dow AgroSciences LLC announced a deal to purchase assets from Iowa-based Sansgaard Seed Farms Inc. Indianapolis-based Dow Agro will receive rights to Sansaard’s Praide Brand Seed brand, as well as other marketing assets, land, buildings and equipment. Sansgaard’s Iowa headquarters and staff will remain intact. But now Dow Agro will market its corn and soybean seeds under the Prairie Brand name. Dow has made several acquisitions of seed distributors in the past three years to build a distribution network for its SmartStax genetically engineered seed, as well as future innovations, like its Enlist Weed Control System for corn and soybeans. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Nyhart, an Indianapolis-based actuarial and employee-benefits consulting firm, has acquired Atlanta-based Stanley, Holcombe & Associates, which focused on public pensions and defined-benefit retirement consulting. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Nyhart will keep the existing Atlanta office space as well as retain the entire Atlanta staff. The deal gives Nyhart a base of retirement clients that have more than $14 billion in plan assets.In December, Nyhart announced the purchase of the Kansas City, Mo., operations of retirement consultancy Alliance Benefit Group.
Three years after Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard launched a city office designed to help ex-offenders avoid a repeat prison visit, some of those original supporters say the city’s Office of Re-Entry Initiatives not only has fallen short of that goal but has accomplished little else.
We Hoosiers are an economic anomaly, an island of growth and resurgent prosperity.
In a monthly feature that runs in the first issue of the month, through October, IBJ is identifying influential players in eight different industry categories. Formidable brainpower sums up the individuals included in our list of Who’s Who in Life Sciences.
Eli Lilly and Co. lost the first round of its family legal dispute with Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. The California-based company won an injunction that prevents Indianapolis-based Lilly from using the same sales force to sell the Amylin-created drug Byetta as well as a new drug called Tradjenta, made by Germany-based Boerhinger Ingelheim GmbH. Both drugs are for patients with Type 2 diabetes, and therefore would compete against each other. Byetta is an injectable medicine and Tradjenta is an oral agent. Lilly said it is disappointed with the first ruling and will keep fighting Amylin’s lawsuit.
Franklin-based Johnson Memorial Hospital and Indianapolis-based Community Health Network will put their clinical collaboration agreement into effect June 1. The agreement was reached in February, after Johnson Memorial also considered proposals from Franciscan St. Francis and Indiana University Health. The deal, while not an acquisition, solidifies Community’s presence in the fast-growing southern suburbs of Indianapolis, where it already maintains a 150-bed hospital along County Line Road. Johnson Memorial, located nearly 15 miles south, is licensed for 101 beds. Hospitals and doctors are being pushed by health insurance plans to partner up to keep patients healthy—both before and after they actually seek medical care. But Community and Johnson Memorial are also looking to expand their offerings, particularly for heart patients.
Advion BioServices, a subsidiary of New York-based Advion BioSciences Inc., has opened its 22,000-square-foot drug-discovery and bioanalytical laboratory at the Purdue Research Park of Indianapolis' technology center at the Ameriplex Business Park near the Indianapolis International Airport. The new facility, staffed with 50 employees, was announced in March. Advion, a contract-research organization, will focus on earlier-stage, drug-discovery and metabolism bioanalytical services that evaluate how a potential new medicine is absorbed and metabolized in experimental models. Many of these services generate the data needed to prepare a molecule for human trials.
Indianapolis-based BioStorage Technologies announced Thursday it has opened a 60,000-square-foot biorepository facility in Indianapolis. The $4.6 million facility, located near the Indianapolis International Airport, will be used to prepare, store and transport tissue and blood samples. BioStorage serves biotech companies, such as Massachusetts-based Biogen Idec, as well as medical-device makers such as Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc. and academic research institutions. The facility will allow BioStorage to prepare samples for its clients via automated equipment, which the company says provides the accuracy needed by high-volume medical researchers. BioStorage, founded in 2002, is one of a handful of central Indiana companies that have developed a specialty in life sciences logistics. Others include Indianapolis-based Sentry BioPharma Services Inc., Plainfield-based MD Logistics Inc., and Bloomington-based BioConvergence LLC.
Scientists with Roche Holding AG, the parent company of Indianapolis-based Roche Diagnostics Corp., may have found a way to overcome a blood barrier that keeps drugs from directly entering the brain, potentially opening new pathways to attack Alzheimer’s disease.
Agency’s advocates express relief but say new structure leaves anti-smoking efforts vulnerable to politics.
Groups that perennially press the Indiana Department of Transportation to broaden its vision of mobility beyond highways now accuse the agency of “significant ineptitude or willful disregard” in eliciting public input.
“Minority” is rapidly evolving to “majority,” and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
Eli Lilly and Co. is a two-timing lout, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., a San Diego-based company with which Lilly has developed and co-marketed Byetta, a successful diabetes drug. Amylin’s lawsuit accuses Indianapolis-based Lilly of breaking terms of their deal by forming a similar development and marketing agreement with Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH to sell a drug that will compete with Byetta. The competing drug, called Tradjenta, was approved for sale this month by U.S. regulators. Lilly and Boehringer formed their agreement in January. Amylin said it plans to continue working with Lilly, but it wants to keep Lilly from using the same sales force to sell both Byetta and Tradjenta. Its lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Lilly’s top diabetes executive, Enrique Conterno, called Amylin’s suit “without merit.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requested new data or new studies from Zimmer Holdings Inc., DePuy Orthopaedics Inc., Biomet Inc. and many other makers of orthopedic implants to see if metal-on-metal hip implants raise the level of metals in patients’ blood, according to Bloomberg News. Zimmer, DePuy and Biomet are all based in Warsaw. Zimmer spokesman Garry Clark wrote in an e-mail to Bloomberg News that his company was "working to understand the scope of the agency's request."
Ball Memorial Hospital was losing $9 million a year before Indianapolis-based Indiana University Health acquired it in 2009. Two years later, Ball executives say the Muncie hospital has swung to a $6 million gain, according to The Star Press in Muncie. Ball Memorial executives say they reduced costs via an 18-month pay freeze and by taking advantage of IU Health’s greater buying power. “If Ball Memorial is paying $10 a unit but the next day I can pay $7 because of the IU Health relationship, those cost savings are significant,” Ball Memorial chief Michael Haley told the newspaper. He added that the hospital has worked to increase patient referrals by repairing strained relationships with local physicians, many of whom were referring patients to hospitals in Fort Wayne or Indianapolis.
A consumer advocacy group says Eli Lilly and Co.’s Amyvid, an experimental imaging agent to help doctors detect Alzheimer’s disease in patients’ brains, shouldn’t be approved because it could lead to false diagnoses of the disease, according to Bloomberg News. Public Citizen, based in Washington, D.C., voiced its concerns in a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, criticizing a 35-person study of Amyvid published in January. Amyvid, which Lilly acquired last year in a $300 million purchase of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc., was recommended in March by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel—if Lilly developed a training program to help doctors interpret brain scans in which the agent lights up clusters of amyloid plaques, the telltale sign of Alzheimer’s. Currently, such plaques can only be observed in autopsies of deceased Alzheimer’s patients. But Public Citizen wants Amyvid tested by more doctors in more patients, because it says results so far have been unreliable. Lilly officials called the group’s claims “inaccurate.”
The head of the continent’s largest producer of bottled water told Indiana recycling advocates his industry should take more responsibility in the reuse of plastic bottles.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s Amyvid, an experimental imaging agent to detect signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain, shouldn’t be approved because of unreliable study results, a consumer-advocacy group said.
The best estimates tell us that about 26 percent of all Americans are mothers, and that the past few decades have seen a big increase in the range of ages of motherhood.
Without someone to ring the bell and call out the low blows, there isn’t much stopping political tussles from escalating to fights and then to brawls.
Indiana hospitals could pull in more than $100 million a year from the federal government under a new assessment fee included in the state’s 2011 budget bill.
Every business sector has influential players, whether they are in the public eye or wield their influence behind the scenes. IBJ is identifying those people in eight different industry categories. Up this month: commercial real estate.
Many Indiana citizens have been hit hard by the recession, and the General Assembly has reacted by kicking them while they’re down.