NCBiotech News

“This is the best time ever to be alive and to be in agriculture,” Lowell Catlett, Ph.D, an economist and futurist, told the lunch session at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s AgBiotech Summit 2016.

Patheon, a global pharmaceutical company headquartered in Durham, is embarking on an initial public offering of stock that it hopes will raise up to $700 million.

Seventy-one companies headquartered in 20 countries now have a presence in North Carolina, employing more than 17,000 people in the state, where they have made capital investments totaling well over $2.5 billion in the past five years alone.

Carver Nichols, a senior honor student at Brevard High School, was a finalist in the BioGENEius Challenge, an international science fair in which North Carolina's lone 2016 finalist competed against 14 others from the United States, Canada and Germany.

Plans for a new kind of agricultural technology startup company started to take shape today with the announcement of an $11.5 million AgTech Accelerator corporation in Research Triangle Park.

These two life science mega-deals reaching or exceeding the $1 billion threshold were struck in North Carolina during 2015.

Premier Research, a global contract research organization, will create 260 high-paying jobs and build a $4.1 million operations center in the Research Triangle Park over the next five years.

Besides the four active Nobel Laureates conducting research at Duke and UNC, here are 13 others with N.C. connections who have also won the major global recognition.

David Mann, CEO of Vascular Biosciences, recalls the rush when his company was chosen to pitch its story as the 2015 “Buzz of BIO” award winner.

The North Carolina Biotechnology Center has inaugurated a new grant program to help evaluate the likelihood of commercial success for life science inventions from universities and non-profit research organizations statewide.

The Biotechnology Innovation Grant (BIG) provides up to $100,000 to full-time faculty scientists at North Carolina universities. The grants require a 10 percent match as well as a partnership between the scientist receiving the award and one or more business partners.

Durham drug development company Vascular BioSciences (VBS) has hit the big-time, chosen as one of this year’s two most highly innovative biotechnology companies.

GlaxoSmithKline's R&D facility in Research Triangle Park. Photo courtesy of GlaxoSmithKline

It could have been a somber event. Snow, ice and layoffs were looming.

Chapel Hill bioscience company BioKier has leveraged early loan support from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center into a $1.7 million funding package.
 

Verona Pharma, a British clinical-stage biotech firm with U.S. headquarters in Raleigh, is exploring the option of repurposing its leading drug candidate to treat COVID-19 patients.

As part of the celebration of the opening of SoBran's Greensboro animal research facility, the company and NCBiotech are co-sponsoring the Innovation for Impact Prize contest for researchers at North Carolina academic institutions and emerging companies – those with fewer than 50 employees and annual revenue under $10 million.