NCBiotech News

Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem has won a $579,961 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to define the workforce skills technicians will need for manufacturing jobs at the intersection of biomedical devices and tissue engineering.

Advanced Chemotherapy Technology of Raleigh is developing an implantable device to infuse chemotherapy drugs directly into the pancreas, targeting difficult-to-reach tumors while largely sparing surrounding tissues, organs and blood vessels. 

Dova Pharmaceuticals of Durham has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its first commercial drug, a tablet for treating thrombocytopenia, or low blood platelet counts, which can cause dangerous bleeding.

Thaddeus Wadas, Ph.D., assistant professor of cancer biology at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine whose research has been funded by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, has gained international recognition for his achievements in cancer imaging and radiotherapy research.

Precision medicine is opening the door to enormous opportunity. And that’s driving an influential group of leaders from academia, business and government—through the North Carolina Precision Health Collaborative — to establish our state as one of the country’s key precision health knowledge hubs.

Renovion, a Durham pharmaceutical company developing a therapy for chronic inflammatory airway diseases, has added $350,000 in private equity to the $1.8 million raised in 2017.

Three bioscience executives from industry and academia have been appointed to roles on the Advisory Committee for Biotechnology in the Piedmont Triad, which advocates for bioscience development in the region, and the Committee’s Executive Advisory Council.

URO-1, a medical device startup company in Winston-Salem, has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin marketing its first product, a new system using existing endoscopes for injecting Botox into the bladder to treat overactive bladder.

Even though Biogen’s headquarters are in the Boston suburb of Cambridge, the global biopharmaceutical company’s ethos of community reinvestment continues to enrich North Carolina. That was again evident this week when Biogen marked the opening of its first-ever Global Business Services (GBS) Center by announcing the addition of 150 new, local jobs during the next two years.

The North Carolina Biotechnology Center awarded 44 grants and loans totaling $2.65 million to universities, bioscience companies and other organizations in the second and third quarters of its fiscal year.

The Life Science Economic Development Summit
On Monday, April 30, economic developers, educators and elected officials from across the state gathered in downtown Raleigh to discuss attracting and growing the life science industry in North Carolina. Hot topics at this year’s Life Science and Economic Development Summit included:
•    How the state can attract life science companies to rural parts of the state
•    What companies need when they launch or relocate their business 

Two dozen bioscience companies that previously received loans from the Biotech Center raised about $115 million in follow-on funding from other sources in the last two quarters, according to research by the Biotech Center’s Life Science Intelligence staff.

When North Carolina State University leaders asked, “What can we be best at,” agriculture research and innovation was a compelling answer. And it will start taking physical form later this year as the Plant Sciences Research Complex, part of the state's new Plant Sciences Initiative (PSI).

Two speakers at this week's NCBiotech Ag Biotech Professional Forum described how their companies are harnessing peptides and metabolites to boost the innate immune response in plants.

The Johnston County Workforce Center (JCWC) will be getting a $1.3 million renovation. Upgrades will support the skills needed with the expansions being done at Grifols and Novo Nordisk to name a few.

Since the center’s grand opening in 2005, it has been a model for life sciences training and development centers in North Carolina. The updates being done will help keep up with the emerging opportunities in the life science field.