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Source: BUniverse

“Being at the bench, sometimes it moves so slow, so incremental,” Effort says. “I wanted to be part of translating things that would help treat disease or fix problems.”

And so, after earning a master’s degree, Effort began to seek out what she calls a “solutions-oriented” career, one that would help move clinically or commercially useful science further downstream. Working in Boston University’s Technology Development Office, she now helps manage the school’s portfolio of life science inventions and helps faculty translate their research ideas.

Read the full article at Genomeweb.com: Click here.

Read the full article at NECN.com: Click here.

Read more about AcuityBio on their website: Click here.

Read the full article on the NO FEAR Community’s website: Click here.

This fourth annual Primary Healthcare Prize is a national competition encouraging engineering students to develop creative technological innovations with great potential to catalyze and support improved delicery of care at the frontlines of medicine. It is open to graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in accredited engineering programs.

Prize Awards:

First Prize: $150,000
Second Prize: $100,000
Third Prize: $50,000
Ten Finalists: $10,000 each

Key Dates:
December 1, 2011:	Submission Pricess opens *
January 16, 2012:	Pre-proposals due
February 15, 2012:	Ten Finalists selected, and $10,000 distributed to each
June 3, 2012:	Full Proposals due from these 10 finalists
July 2, 2012:	Top three Prize Winners announced, and major awards distributed!

*Detailed submission information and lists of past winners and topics here.

Technologies of particular interest are ones that could improve access to medical care, leverage the skill of caregivers, automate routine tasks, increase workflow efficiency, support patients managing chronic disease, reduce medical error, or augment the physician-patient relationship.

“Winning the Prize has helped me to build an experimental doctor’s office and patient home in a setting where it will be possible to demonstrate our novel technologies for care delivery in a dramatically more compelling manner.”
-John Moore, doctoral candidate atht e MIT Media Lab and Winner of the 2009 CIMIT Prize for Primary Healthcare

This Primary Healthcare Prize competition is sponsored by the Gelfand Family Charitable Trust Administered by the Massachusetts General Hospital with the assistance of CIMIT.

Imagine, just before your morning commute, you enter your office location and a price range into a GPS or mobile device, and it returns directions to the vacant, appropriately priced parking spot that’s closest to your office, reserved just for you.

This “smart parking” scenario may be a click away, thanks to technology that Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE) and systems engineering graduate student Yanfeng Geng are developing. In early August, the research team completed their first live test of a preliminary version of a smart parking system in the lower level of the 730 Commonwealth Avenue garage beneath 15 Saint Mary’s Street.
In the test, a ceiling-mounted, computer-linked sensor network continuously monitored parking spot activity and incoming reservation requests. Before entering the garage, a smartphone-equipped driver submitted an ID number and reservation request through a website. After validating the ID, the system updated a light indicator on the spot (and on a map displayed on the website) from green (unoccupied) to yellow (reserved), and, when the driver parked, to red (occupied). Once the driver departed, the system switched the light back to green and charged a parking fee to the driver’s account.

From the moment he entered the garage, the driver navigated his way to his designated spot in only about five seconds.

Read the full article on BU’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering website: Click here.

The Phase 2 clinical trial is an open label, single arm, multi-center trial study in patients with SCCHN, who will receive weekly infusions of Sym004. The primary endpoint will be progression free survival at 24 weeks. Secondary endpoints include objective tumor response, time to progression, biomarkers, pharmacokinetic profile, and safety.

The trial was initiated at the Antwerp University Hospital, Belgium. Additional sites are expected to be opened in Belgium, Germany, France and the US.

Kirsten Drejer, M.Sc. and Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Symphogen commented: “The preclinical data published in Cancer Research [1] and Clinical Cancer Research [2], as well as the Phase 1 data presented at ASCO 2011, hold great promise for Sym004, and we are very excited about advancing this compound into clinical evaluation for treatment of SCCHN as well as mCRC in patients who have failed anti-EGFR antibody based therapy”.

“Patients with advanced SCCHN and progressive disease after treatment with surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and anti-EGFR mAb’s have few treatment alternatives today. Based on the pre-clinical results, it’s new mechanism of action and  preliminary Phase 1 data, I believe that Sym004 has the potential to induce tumor responses and provide this severely ill and poor prognosis population with a treatment option.” stated coordinating investigator Professor Jean-Pascal Machiels, Cliniques Universitaires St-Luc, Centre du Cancer, Brussels, Belgium.

About Sym004

Sym004 is composed of two anti-EGFR mAbs targeting different non-overlapping epitopes. Sym004 not only blocks ligand binding, receptor activation/phosphorylation and downstream signaling but also shows a unique ability to induce rapid and efficient removal of the EGFR receptors from the cancer cell surface by inducing EGFR internalization and degradation [1]. Sym004 also has the potential to treat tumors with acquired resistance to other EGFR-targeted agents [1]. The preliminary data from the clinical Phase 1 study indicate that only the expected adverse event profile of EGFR target mAb therapeutics was observed, i.e. diarrhea, rash, mucosal inflammation, nausea, infusion related reaction and hypomagnesemia. Exposure data from the patients, after weekly repeated infusions, do not indicate an anti-drug antibody response.

About Symphogen

Symphogen is developing superior antibody therapeutics (monoclonal, monoclonal mixtures and polyclonal) to help people with serious diseases and significant unmet medical needs. With its proprietary, unique Symplex™ discovery, SymSelect™ lead selection and Sympress™ manufacturing platforms, the company captures the diversity and specificity of the natural immune response in rationally designed recombinant antibody compositions. Symphogen is maturing a diversified pipeline of internal and partnered products across multiple indications including cancer, autoimmune and infectious disease. Symphogen is a private biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. For more information, please visit www.symphogen.com.

Contacts:
Dr. Ivan Horak,
Chief Scientific & Medical Officer
Phone: +1 908 9389313 (mobile US) or +45 20 55 26 04 (mobile EU)
E-mail: idh@symphogen.com

Media contact (US):
Shari Annes
Annes Associates
Phone: +1 650 888 0902
E-mail: sannes@annesassociates.com

References:

1)    Pedersen et al. A novel synergistic anti–epidermal growth factor receptor antibody mixture with superior anticancer efficacy. Cancer Research 2010 Jan 15; 70(2):588-597.

2)    Skartved et al. Preclinical pharmacokinetics and safety of _Sym004: A synergistic antibody mixture directed against epidermal growth factor receptor. Clinical Cancer Research 2011 Aug 8 (E-publication ahead of print)

Details of the conference may be found at www.srltvl.org.  Registration is now open, with earlybird rates available till October 1.

Speakers will explore the emergence over the past decade of a variety of voluntary licensing mechanisms, in which innovators voluntarily give up their legitimate patent monopolies to allow innovation to reach the developing world affordably.  Such mechanisms are an alternative approach to the compulsory licensing mechanisms provided for in international intellectual property treaties such as TRIPS that have proven to be both confrontational and cumbersome to invoke.

Robert Brown, President of Boston University said:  “The private sector has developed a number of highly innovative mechanisms to facilitate the transfer of innovation to emerging economies over the past decade which we term “Voluntary Licensing”.  The purpose of this conference is to comprehensively review these mechanisms and to look at their application in healthcare, food and agriculture and cleantech.”

Nigel Thrift, Vice Chancellor of the University of Warwick, said:  “President Brown and I are delighted to be able to bring together leading researchers and key businesses to examine this issue. We have an opportunity to work together to make a significant contribution to achieving social equity in the dissemination of innovation.”

The conference will include speakers from:

• Aspen Pharmacare Holdings, Ltd.
• BIO Ventures for Global Health
• Boston University
• DNDi
• Gilead Sciences Inc.
• GlaxoSmithKline, PLC
• Medicines Patent Pool
• Merck & Co. Inc.
• MPEG LA
• PIPRA
• Sterne, Kessler & Fox
• University of Costa Rica
• University of Oxford
• University of Warwick
• Warwick Ventures
• World Intellectual Property Organization

Boston University and the University of Warwick encourage the participation of students, and details of a limited number of travel scholarships are available at www.srltvl.org

Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized private research university with more than 30,000 students participating in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs. BU consists of 17 colleges and schools along with a number of multi-disciplinary centers and institutes which are central to the school’s research and teaching mission.

Since its founding in 1965, the University of Warwick has developed into one of Britain’s leading research universities.  It has more than 22,000 students, of whom a third are post-graduate, 1,700 academic staff in four faculties and 900 research staff.  It is a member of the Russell Group of leading British research universities and was ranked 7^th in the most recent Research Assessment Exercise.

For additional information, contact Ashley Stevens at astevens@bu.edu or +1 (617) 251-6088 or Mark Barnett at m.a.barnett@warwick.ac.uk or +44 (7824) 541 199.