Stay current on news from Wisconsin’s innovation community with these recent headlines:
—Gener8tor announced the six startups chosen to receive investments and mentorship during its latest 12-week accelerator program, which kicked off last month and runs through November. The program is being run out of Gener8tor’s Milwaukee offices, and three of the companies in the current cohort are based in or just outside of the city. They are GenoPalate, SteamChain, and Ideawake, which is developing software to help businesses gather and evaluate product ideas from clients and employees. Ideawake represents a new spin on founder Coby Skonord’s previous startup Inventalator.
—In other Gener8tor news, the Wisconsin-based organization is bringing gBETA, a free, seven-week training program for entrepreneurs, to Detroit. According to gBETA’s website, the inaugural Motor City program will kick off Oct. 19 and run through Dec. 7. Stella Safari has been named director of gBETA Detroit, according to the organization’s website.
—Janesville-based Shine Medical Technologies will move into a prototype production facility in January, where the company will test its technology for producing radioisotopes used in diagnostic medical imaging procedures, the Janesville Gazette reported. Shine and some of its competitors have been racing to start producing the isotope molybdenum-99 in an effort to avert a looming potential shortage.
Shine reportedly plans to break ground by June 2018 on a full-scale production plant that will be located next to the prototype building, and complete construction of the larger facility in 2019.
—We brought you several digital health stories this week from Epic Systems’ annual Users Group Meeting, which was held on the company’s sprawling corporate campus in Verona. Epic develops software that hospitals and clinics around the world use to manage their patients’ medical records.
Judy Faulkner, Epic’s founder and CEO, gave an address in which she discussed some of its customers’ recent successes, as well as ways to improve how Epic rolls out new features.
Company leaders also discussed ways Epic’s software could function as a virtual assistant in the future, allowing doctors and other care providers to use just their voices to document information while seeing patients.
Lastly, as some predicted, Epic officially announced a broader launch of its App Orchard, a program allowing hospitals and clinics that use Epic’s software to share apps they’ve built and browse third-party digital health products that have been configured to work with Epic.
—Meanwhile, one of Epic’s competitors, Kansas City, MO-based Cerner (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CERN]]), is being sued by a Wisconsin hospital for $16 million, the Kansas City Business Journal reported. Agnesian HealthCare in Fond du Lac reportedly filed suit against Cerner earlier this month for breach of warranty, claiming that problems with the company’s billing software resulted in millions of dollars in losses for the hospital. As a result of the technical issues, Agnesian said it had to send patients bills manually, “resulting in a large backlog of unprocessed statements, some of which ended as write-offs,” according to the report.
—Madison-based Cellectar Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CLRB]]) announced a partnership with another cancer drug developer, Newtown, PA-based Onconova Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ONTX]]). Under the terms of the agreement, Onconova will provide drug compounds to Cellectar, which will link them to its drug delivery platform. Cellectar’s technology is based in part on phospholipid ethers, which are designed to help kill tumors while minimizing the amount of healthy tissue destroyed in the process.
—Chris Meyer, the founder of the Madison makerspace Sector67, was seriously injured and hospitalized in a propane explosion that occurred last week while he was working to ready the organization’s future home. He is expected to remain in the hospital for a month or longer, and it will be at least a year before he makes a full recovery, according to the organizers of a crowdfunding campaign supporting Meyer and Sector67. The GoFundMe campaign has raised nearly $100,000 in a week.
