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Company News: bubbles & beyond launches printing roll cleansing agent line enpurex®
Next-generation, superior intelligent cleansing fluids reduce printing down time, get rid of dangerous substances
bubbles & beyond, a technology company focusing on customized intelligent fluids™, today announced the official launch of its enpurex® product line, a range of next-generation cleansing agents that mark the beginning of a new era in printing industry cleaning. The cleansers are water-based, non-flammable, free from aggressive chemicals, biodegradable, and also superior to existing products in terms of efficacy. enpurex® products are based on bubbles & beyond´s novel, proprietary intelligent fluids™ approach and offer significant process cost savings, excellent compatibility of materials, optimum efficacy and operating safety.
Food for Thought: Evotec’s Werner Lanthaler on Capital Efficiency in the Biotech Industry
Werner Lanthaler, CEO of German biotech company Evotec AG, who managed to make the company profitable for the first time in 18 years, this month gave his appraisal of how medical research can regain its former glory in a commentary in MedNous.
With only 200 of 6,000 biotech projects being potential deal candidates for big pharma (and less than half of them being potential top-sellers), Lanthaler states that capital efficiency needs to be the new norm in innovation.
To make this happen, he gives four recommendations:
1. Always fight the cause of the disease, not the symptoms. To make this happen, Lanthaler calls for new cooperation models involving research institutions, companies, regulators, and payers. In large indications, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Lanthaler suggests joint initiatives by big pharma corporations.
2. Only end-products, not processes count. This means that efforts to pump more public money into early stage research is fruitless unless it is accompanied by translational work. To focus on products, Lanthaler recommends that companies build more flexible organizations and lower fixed costs and spending.
3. Learn killing projects early. Lanthaler states this requires delegation, very fast decision-making and increased trust in innovation that comes from outside the larger company. Companies should even consider outsourcing certain decision-making processes.
4. Win the next war for talent, so that you can identify and access the best science, be it internal or external.
On the last point, Lanthaler is currently seeking scientists. He told the Hamburg-based local paper Hamburger Abendblatt recently that Evotec is heavily recruiting and welcomes applications of excellent researchers. “If the profile is matching we hire every talent,” he said.
MedNous is a print publication and a website for everyone involved in medical research in Europe. It was founded by Victoria English and William Ellington, two seasoned business and science journalists.
Company News: Anergis Closes CHF 18 Million Series A Financing Round to Develop its Innovative Allergy Vaccines and Expands its Board of Directors
Anergis SA announced today that it has closed a Series A financing round raising CHF 18 millions from European biotech funds and private local investors. Anergis SA is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative immunotherapies against allergies. Its lead product, called “AllerT” and made of so-called Contiguous Overlapping Peptides (COPs), is designed to provide ultra-fast and safe desensitization to birch pollen allergy, a widely spread condition in developed countries.
The financing round was co-led by three major European funds with extensive biotech experience: Vinci Capital-Renaissance PME (Lausanne, Switzerland), BioMedInvest (managed by BioMedPartners AG, Basel, Switzerland) and Sunstone Capital (Copenhagen, Denmark). The syndicate was also joined by Esperante (Limhamn, Sweden), Initiative Capital Romandie (Lausanne, Switzerland) and by private investors. Up until now, Anergis has invested CHF 3 million in its innovative allergy vaccines. These funds were raised from private investors and from a grant by the Swiss Innovation Fund (CTI).
The newly joining investors also bring substantial pharmaceutical experience and know-how to Anergis: Patrick Scherrer (representing Vinci Capital-Renaissance PME), Markus Hosang (representing BioMedInvest) and Sten Verland (representing Sunstone Capital) have joined the Anergis Board of Directors. The Board will be chaired by André J. Mueller, a professional with unique executive and non-executive experience in biotech ventures, which he gained with Biogen and Actelion and as the Chairman of the Boards of Cerenis Therapeutics (Toulouse) and Addex Pharmaceuticals (Geneva).
Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up
Sebastian Matthes, Thomas Kuhn, Dieter Duerand and Susanne Kutter this week in Wirtschaftswoche introduce the winners of Innovationspreis 2011 (innovation award 2011). In the “Startup” category, the winner is Human Machine Intelligence, a Heidelberg-based IT company that developed the “Lingua” software able to understand and answer complete spoken sentences. “Big corporation” category winner is machine building company Freudenberg for its development of production processes that save 85% steel and do not produce waste. In the “medium-sized business” category, the winner is med tech firm Carl Zeiss Meditec which developed Intrabeam, a new cancer radiation therapy device that saves breast cancer patients week-long radiation therapy cycles and improves quality of life.
Also in Wirtschaftswoche, Andreas Menn features innovative printing technologies based on conductive ink and provides glimpses into the future of organic electronics for everyday products: flexible and printed electronic displays for ads and packages, loudspeakers from plastic foil, broadcasting metro tickets and pill containers that inform a cell phone software once a patient has withdrawn a pill. Among others, the article introduces German startup Printechnologics, based in Chemnitz, whose Aircode Touch technology can mark any type of paper with an invisible code that can be recognized and processed by smartphone touchscreens so that it can direct users to websites and/or authenticity certificates. Another German startup, Heliatek in Dresden, is developing printed solar cells that are to be sold by the meter in building supply stores.
Steven Salzberg in Forbes this week features a vitriolic comment of the decision of respected BioMedCentral (BMC), owned by Springer Science publishing house, to add a journal devoted to “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, or TCM, to its portfolio of respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals. He introduces a “laughably bad study” and states, readers should bring “a high tolerance for quackery”, concluding: “BMC should be embarrassed to be publishing journals that promote anti-scientific theories and otherwise muddy the literature. By supporting these journals, they undermine the credibility of many excellent BMC journals. They should cut these journals loose.”
The Economist this week writes about “a serious gap in biologists’ understanding of the diversity of life”, featuring metagenomics research results that points to the existence of a new domain of life in the oceans, adding to the already known domains of archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. Another feature deals with back-scattering interferometry (BSI) that can be applied to studying membrane proteins unmodified and in situ using a laser in a simple, low-cost way. The technology may be used to study the interference of membrane receptors with drug candidates and to understand side effects and differences in the response of patients to already marketed drugs. Already, the inventors founded a startup, Molecular Sensing, in San Francisco, Calif.
In New Scientist this week, Helen Thomson reports that a brain electronic implant in a paralyzed women successfully passed the 1,000-day milestone. Wendy Zukerman describes that a new, non-invasive test might soon be available to diagnose the nerve damage associated with diabetes to predict the amputation risk of diabetes patients, and Peter Aldhouse writes about his first encounter with robots at Complete Genomics, a California-based startup that offers large-scale, complete human genome sequencing services as an end-to-end outsourced service to companies and research institutions.