With Boston’s biotech scene enduring a bit of a lull as the summer winds down, healthcare IT startups in New York grabbed some of the spotlight this week. That and more below:
—New York City-based Mana Health won a contract from the New York eHealth Collaborative to design a patient portal—an online application for patients and healthcare providers to view health records—accessible from every healthcare provider in the state. The contract is reportedly worth between $500,000 and $1 million. Reggie Bradford, Oracle’s senior VP of business development, has also joined Mana’s board of directors and invested in the company.
—New York City-based Medivizor began offering its personalized medical information service to the general public this week, roughly one year after its inception. Through its service, Medivizor is designed as a personalized filter for people with specific diseases such as breast or colorectal cancer. It would comb through online resources to find the latest credible, relevant information about their condition, and send its subscribers detailed e-mails that are stripped of medical jargon and written in plain English.
—Basking Ridge, NJ-based Regado Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:RGDO]]) became one of the few biotechs of late to stumble into the public markets. Regado downsized its IPO and cut its offering price considerably before finally hitting the Nasdaq on Thursday morning. Regado priced 10.75 million shares at $4 apiece, raising a total of roughly $43 million. It initially hoped to raise $75 million by offering 5 million shares at between $14 and $16 apiece, and expected to price shares at $5 apiece as of Monday. Regado will use the cash to help fund a big late-stage clinical trial for a two-pronged anticoagulant to be used in coronary procedures known as REG-1.
—-Lebanon, NH-based Adimab has found two new partners to come in and test out its antibody drug discovery technology. Summit, NJ-based Celgene and China-based Innovent Biologics will each identify one or more biological targets for Adimab to discover antibodies against, and then license them from Adimab or split their commercialization rights with the company. Adimab, which has done several deals like this in the past, didn’t disclose how much each transaction is worth.
—Princeton, NJ-based Advaxis named former executive vice president Daniel J. O’Connor its new president and CEO. O’Connor held executive positions previously at ImClone Systems and PharmaNet. He replaces Thomas Moore, who had been Advaxis’s CEO for more than six years. Moore will still be a consultant to Advaxis and stay on its board of directors. Advaxis recently won orphan drug status for an experimental drug candidate, ADXS-HPV, that it aims to use to treat human papillomavirus-associated cancers.
—New York-based Exosome Diagnostics forged a partnership with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to develop tests for certain cancers, inflammatory diseases, and other conditions.
—Cambridge, MA-based Catabasis began a mid-stage clinical trial testing a drug known as CAT-2003 in patients with very high triglyceride levels. It will also examine the drug’s ability to lower the high cholesterol levels of patients taking statins.
—Make sure to join Xconomy for our next biotech event, “Boston’s Life Science Disruptors,” at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA, on Oct. 2. Tickets are on sale already, and you can grab a discount if you register by Labor Day.
