Officials say the Silicon Valley office will focus on attracting California companies to move to Indiana and to sell venture capitalists on ideas and research generated by Purdue faculty and entrepreneurs.
Zionsville gallery owners are stepping up their collective marketing efforts as Carmel’s Arts and Design District has landed a new wave of artists and gallery owners over the past five months.
Indianapolis-based college sports body acknowledges that it needs the help of others, including former players, coaches and the National Football League, to reduce improprieties.
There’s a leadership change in progress at Prosolia Inc., an Indianapolis company launched out of Purdue University in 2004. Veteran life sciences entrepreneur Peter Kissinger has stepped down as interim CEO and will be replaced by Prosolia’s research director, Justin Wiseman. Wiseman also will fill the role of president, which was vacated by the recent departure of Kevin Boscacci. The company said Boscacci, who helped launched Prosolia as an MBA student at Purdue, left “to pursue other opportunities.” Prosolia’s technology helps measure mass and therefore identify large, complex molecules for pharmaceutical and other industries.
California-based life sciences firm Beckman Coulter Inc. is planning its third local expansion since 2007, investing $18.2 million in its Indianapolis operation and adding as many as 95 jobs here in the next three years. Beckman Coulter, which makes biomedical testing equipment, plans to begin hiring manufacturing associates immediately for its facilities at 5355 W. 76th St. and 5550 Lakeview Parkway. It also will add employees in field service, engineering and general business roles.
Purdue University and Bloomington-based Cook Biotech Inc. prevailed in a European patent dispute over a tissue graft. Denmark-based ScanVet, which distributes the Acell Vet graft, has now run out of time to appeal previous decisions in favor of Purdue by the Danish patent office and patent appeals board. The patent lies behind some of the Cook Biotech products manufactured at the Purdue Research Park in West Lafayette. The grafts are used to heal wounds and as implants in surgical procedures.
Centerstone Research Institute in Bloomington won a four-year, $2 million grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The grant will fund improved health care services for 250 adults who have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness by expanding primary health care and Centerstone of Indiana’s Bloomington clinic. The project is designed to give individuals who have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness broader access to a team of primary care doctors and nurses, as well as mental health staff.
California-based life sciences firm Beckman Coulter Inc. is planning its third local expansion since 2007, investing $18.2 million in its Indianapolis operation and adding as many as 95 jobs here in the next three years.
Move adds the nation’s largest bank to a growing list of mortgage companies whose employees signed documents in foreclosure cases without verifying the information in them.
Clever adaptation of new technology has helped propel Exacq Technologies’ dizzying 1,624-percent growth rate in the last three years.
A bipartisan duo of state lawmakers wants Congress to allow states to collect sales taxes on Internet purchases, a move they say could bring hundreds of millions of dollars to cash-strapped Indiana.
This year, 15 states have enacted legislation to reduce future public pension obligations.
What does Indiana have to show for the deluge of resources made available to would-be entrepreneurs in recent years—venture capital, angel investors, incubators and the like? Judging by the number of people taking the plunge into business ownership, not as much as might be expected.
Al Hall started Owl Studios in 2005 to promote local musicians and has expanded its roster of performers to 16.
Conrad General Manager Greg Tinsley says the hotel plans to reopen the high-end spa by Oct. 1, after receiving
notification Friday that it had closed.
Leaders tackle issues ranging from research to cold storage to the future of Eli Lilly and Co.
WellPoint Inc.’s now infamous decision to raise rates on individual customers in California as much as 39 percent was apparently made over objections by the company’s California president. Those increases by the Indianapolis-based health insurer were widely blamed for reigniting a dying health reform bill that WellPoint opposed. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Leslie Margolin said she worked internally to prevent WellPoint from raising rates so high and, once they did, to scale them back. The newspaper reported that Margolin and others voicing concerns about the size and timing of the hikes were overruled by WellPoint corporate executives. Margolin did not voice concerns about the increases when she was called before the California legislature to explain them, but the Times said she did apologize in a speech at Pepperdine University. WellPoint replaced Margolin last month and she told the Times she was escorted from her office by security guards, without a chance to say farewell to her employees. WellPoint said Margolin’s departure had nothing to with the rate hikes.
Officials in Gov. Mitch Daniels’ administration want to use the Healthy Indiana Plan as the vehicle to expand Medicaid coverage under the new federal health reform law—in spite of Daniels’ earlier comments that the new law would kill the three-year-old plan. According to the Associated Press, Indiana human services chief Anne Murphy sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services saying the Healthy Indiana Plan is "the natural vehicle" for expanding Medicaid coverage to Indiana residents in 2014. But when the new health law passed, Daniels described the Healthy Indiana Plan as a "program whose days are numbered" and asked Murphy to begin planning its phaseout.
Northwest Radiology Network PC recently expanded into Anderson by acquiring Madison County Imaging at St. John’s Medical Center and affiliating with Central Indiana Orthopedics of Anderson. Northwest Radiology is now providing its services to St. Vincent Heart Center of Indiana. Both St. John’s and the Heart Center are owned by the St. Vincent Health hospital system, based in Indianapolis.
The complex regulatory process for winning approval of combo medical products is the topic of next week’s Life Sciences Lunch at the Barnes & Thornburg law firm downtown. Gretchen Bowker, an Eli Lilly and Co. alumna and now chief operating officer of Pearl IRB Inc. in Indianapolis, will present, as will Julie Dykstra, a Barnes & Thornburg attorney. The Aug. 17 event, organized by the Indiana Health Industry Forum, costs $10 and starts at 11:30 a.m.
With Eli Lilly, Roche Diagnostics and other large life sciences companies shedding jobs, Indiana needs small
life sciences startups to fill the void. To help such companies, two former Lilly employees are starting an institutional
review board that will help small companies launch clinical trials of their innovative technologies. Pearl IRB,
based in Indianapolis, is run by Lilly alumnae Diana Caldwell and Gretchen Miller Bowker. It is, according to the Indiana
Health Industry Forum, the first commercial institutional review board in the state. That’s significant because such
boards must approve clinical trials before such research on humans can begin. Typically, universities and large hospitals
have institutional review boards, but they are not normally available for researchers not affiliated in some way with those
institutions.
Iraq war veteran Nate Richardson is now using his battlefield experience to launch his own business. His company, Anderson-based
Coeus Technology, developed an antimicrobial liquid it says can be added to military uniforms and equipment
to make them resistant to germs for longer periods of time than current products. The U.S. Army Material Command is currently
testing Coeus’ MonoFoil Technology for its use. But Coeus is also pursuing sales of MonoFoil to civilian users, such
as hospitals and schools. Coeus opened a year ago in Anderson’s Flagship Enterprise Center. It plans to add packing,
filling and research facilities in the next two years, creating 30 to 50 jobs by 2012.
A team of researchers at Purdue University say they’ve found a new marker for prostate cancer that
could replace the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) that is now the leading indicator for the disease. Purdue chemist Graham
Cooks and Purdue oncologist Timothy Ratliff led the team, which found that the compound cholesterol sulfate occurs in prostate
cancer tumors but not in healthy prostate tissue. That stark difference could prove better than PSA, which sometimes appears
at elevated levels in prostates that are inflamed or enlarged, but not cancerous.
The California-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded $364,000 to more than double Indiana University’s
repository of fruit flies, which have served as the basis of most genetic research for the past century. The Bloomington Drosophila
Stock Center houses 30,000 fruit fly strains and helps develop scientific tools that are used to design new fly strains. The
new grant will allow the stock center to expand to as many as 70,000 fruit fly variants. When the stock center moved from
the California Institute of Technology to Indiana University 25 year ago, it was home to only 1,675 strains.
Indianapolis-based Dow AgroSciences posted a profit of $196 million, up from $140 million in the same quarter
last year, according to Bloomberg News. Second-quarter revenue increased 4 percent, to $1.3 billion, for the unit of Michigan-based
Dow Chemical Co. Company officials credited increased sales for Dow AgroSciences’ herbicides, including some new products,
in spite of weather-related delays.
Two years after Bright Automotive was founded, the prospect of thousands of Indiana factory workers cranking out Bright’s
100-mile-per-gallon “IDEA” delivery vans by 2012 seems dim.
Eli Lilly and Co. is launching a diagnostics division to produce tests that can winnow out the patients most likely to benefit
from a Lilly drug.
While the stock market is not as easy to follow as watching a calendar, it leaves evidence as to what it is going to do next,
much like falling leaves warn you about the coming of winter.
When WellPoint Inc. named Angela Braly its CEO three years ago, it touted her experience dealing with politicians and government
regulators. But WellPoint is now the poster child for health insurer bad behavior—credited in Washington with reviving a
dead health reform bill the company opposed.
To spearhead a once-in-a-generation overhaul of local government’s antiquated back-office computer system, Mayor Greg Ballard
has chosen an unprofitable software firm that as recently as March 31 warned investors that debt-refinancing issues could
force it out of business.
