Current medical news and unique business news for anyone who cares about healthcare.
Lawmakers propose bill to loosen FDA panel rules. Spearheaded by Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the Medical Device Regulatory Improvement Act hit the Senate floor on Thursday. The bill aims to ease strict conflict of interest rules for FDA advisers, which make it sometimes difficult to find experts to serve on panels, thus slowing down the approval process. A similar bill is expected to be introduced today in the House.
Another legislative win for medical device companies came yesterday when Congress passed a free-trade agreement with S. Korea, which will will remove taxes from nearly half of U.S. medical devices in the country.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
More jobs in healthcare isn’t necessarily good. Sure, the healthcare industry is creating jobs, but that also means we’re spending more on healthcare. A new research article suggests this also means productivity in healthcare is growing at a slower pace than it in other sectors.
Some perspective on the biotech industry. There are 300 biotech companies trading publicly, and a third of those are trading with a market value of less than $100 million. Based on their cash positions, the top 10 Big Pharma companies could buy 98 percent of all U.S. public, drug-focused R&D biotech companies.
Meaningful Use money may be going into the wrong hands. An iWatch News report claims that many of the medical providers who received payments in the first round of Meaningful Use incentives had already been using health IT measures for years. This may spark concern that incentives designed to motivate adoption of health IT measures may be going going to providers who had already implemented them.
Feel like you’ve been seeing a lot of conflicting reports about the venture capital industry? It’s because you have. Earlier this week, Dow Jones reported venture firm fundraising had tumbled, but today CB Insights reports that venture capitalists, during the same period, invested the highest volume of cash in nine quarters. What do we make of this?
101 investors. Most people have never heard of the company OneWire, but people are talking about its unconventional fundraising strategy. The startup tech company has raised $30 million since 2008 — from 101 individual investors. The founders say they did this so that no one investor wanted to run the company.
