BioSTL

After years of being passed over for the likes of New York, Boston, and Palo Alto, St. Louis may have its opportunity at getting Israeli startups to set up shop and partner with companies in the city. The first candidates for those partnerships could be among five Israeli agricultural technology startups that paid the city a visit last week.

CHICAGO • In one of the biggest corporate expansions the St. Louis region has seen in years, Monsanto said Tuesday that it would add 675 jobs and invest more than $400 million at its research facility in Chesterfield.

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Dr. James McCarter, who founded the biotechnology company Divergence and later sold it to Monsanto Co., has joined BioGenerator as a senior entrepreneur in residence.

BioGenerator, the non-profit venture development organization of BioSTL, has closed on an investment of its pre-seed Spark Fund in Iowa-based Tansna Therapeutics, an epilepsy drug development company that will move to St. Louis, officials announced Tuesday.

ST. LOUIS (KSDK) - More than 1,400 new high-tech related jobs are headed to St. Louis by the end of the year and there are promises of thousands more.

It’s a perennial question among St. Louis entrepreneurs: How to best highlight and leverage St. Louis’ strengths? Now, members of the bioscience and tech industries are getting together to develop a brand platform for the city’s bioscience cluster.

Ameren Corporate Charitable Trust officials have donated $100,000 to BioSTL in order to support entrepreneurs and advance the bioscience cluster in St. Louis.

NewLeaf Symbiotics, an agricultural biotech firm housed at the Bio-Research & Development Growth (BRDG) Park, closed on a $7 million round of financing, the company announced Wednesday.

ST. LOUIS, TORONTO & BOSTON--C₂N Diagnostics, InterVivo Solutions, and inviCRO (“Companies”) today announced the formation of a pre-competitive consortium to develop, standardize, and validate an aged-canine model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression. The multi-year collaboration is believed to be the first-of-its-kind.

Mallinckrodt, the Pharmaceuticals business of Covidien, announced that it has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to manufacture and market a generic version of CONCERTA (methylphenidate HCl) Extended-Release (ER) Tablets USP (CII) in 27, 36 and 54 mg dosage strengths.

The numbers are pretty impressive, more than three dozen new biotech startups now call St. Louis home and collectively they’re hauling in tens of millions of dollars from investors.

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The deal for one of the biggest parts of CORTEX's $186 million second phase to create a biotech and medical research district in Midtown is closing today.

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has received a $50 million grant to help speed the translation of scientific discoveries into improvements in human health.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services assigned a product-specific code for Mitosol, a glaucoma drug produced by Mobius Therapeutics LLC, the company announced today.

Sigma-Aldrich ($SIAL) is tapping the South Korean market with a deal to provide development support for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) for new non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) from a South Korean company.

TOPICS:

• Structure of Biotech Industry in the St. Louis economy and the role/importance of entrepreneurship
• Industry growth opportunities for small and minority-owned business
• Basic requirements to entering the industry as a supplier
• Local "case studies" of small/minority business owners entering this field

Monday we told you about Kypha, a medical device startup that recently completed a $1.5 million fundraising round with the backing of local investors, including the St. Louis Arch Angels network. But that wasn’t the only recent investment the Arch Angels made in the medical device sector.

Covidien's pharma arm has struck a deal to buy up CNS Therapeutics' pipeline of pain and spasticity drug programs for $100 million. Billed as a top distributor of opioid pain products, St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt says that the buyout will complement its own R&D work in the field as it prepares to be spun out of Covidien soon as a public company.

Medical device startup Kypha has raised $1.5 million in a funding round supported by local investors, the company announced on Friday.

Barely two years after getting laid off with hundreds of other researchers at Pfizer's drug research campus in Chesterfield, Joseph Monahan is poised to embark on the most significant research of his career.

MediBeacon LLC, a St. Louis-based start-up in optical diagnostics, is proud to announce the acquisition of assets associated with Mallinckrodt’s optical diagnostic agent development program.

C2N Diagnostics, a biotechnology company working on Alzheimer’s research, has received a $161,927 grant from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Medical device company EndoStim today announced that it has received CE mark approval of its LES Stimulation System for the treatment of gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD).

Call it good timing, in a perverse kind of way. A team of University of Missouri researchers has won a $5.4 million grant to study alternative biofuels that do not impact the already strained food supply.

Theorem Clinical Research and Gallus BioPharmaceuticals have announced an exclusive partnership to accelerate research, development and manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals. As a part of the collaboration, Gallus will provide process development and clinical and commercial supply for mammalian cell-based biopharmaceutical products to Theorem's customers.

ST. LOUIS, MO – C2N Diagnostics today announced that it has received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Award from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award will fund the development of assays for investigating Tau biology.

On Tuesday, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) announced the winners in the three categories of the DEBUT challenge, a biomedical engineering design competition for teams of undergraduate students.

Maryland Heights-based Biomedical Systems has inked a partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital that could yield $10 million worth of new work for the medical data analysis firm.

COPD, most often caused by smoking, encompasses chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Symptoms usually include chronic cough, excessive phlegm and chest tightness, the FDA said in a news release.

Akermin has signed an agreement with Southern Company Services to install and operate a pilot plant using Akermin’s biocatalyst delivery system at the National Carbon Capture Center in Alabama, US.

The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, in collaboration with several other institutions, received a $12.1 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop the grass Setaria viridis as a model species to advance bioenergy grasses as a sustainable fuel source.

It took six years to get here, but Ed Timm’s drug company Mobius Therapeutics    LLC today announced its first shipment of the glaucoma drug Mitosol.

ST. LOUIS — Genetics researchers at Washington University, one of the world’s leading centers for work on the human genome, were devastated. Dr. Lukas Wartman, a young, talented and beloved colleague, had the very cancer he had devoted his career to studying. He was deteriorating fast. No known treatment could save him.

THE International Cancer Genome Consortium, an alliance of laboratories that is trying to produce a definitive list of the genetic mutations that cause cancer, is accumulating data at an astonishing rate. About 3,000 individual breast tumours, for example, have now had their genotypes published.

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis and the Institute of Cancer Research in London plan to use a $4 million grant from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation to identify which breast cancer patients are most likely to experience recurrence and to identify new drug treatments aimed at those women.

Gallus BioPharmaceuticals officials said today that they completed a $20 million expansion of clinical manufacturing, equipment and development facilities at its St. Louis facility.

In his latest project, Dr. John Talley, the lead scientist behind Pfizer’s Celebrex and seven other drugs that have been marketed in the U.S., is trying his hand at developing a cancer medication with improved efficacy and safety.

Sam Fiorello sits comfortably in his office at the Danforth Plant Science Center while he relates a story about a search firm that went through a list of hundreds of candidates seeking a position to head a cutting-edge company.

Researchers at the world’s leading universities, medical centers, and pharmaceutical companies have sought for decades to understand how Alzheimer’s disease causes nerve cells to die in the brain. But despite hundreds of clinical trials, no drugs have been found to halt the disease once patients start suffering memory loss and dementia.

As I noted recently, St. Louis seems to be experiencing a burst of entrepreneurial activity. Judging from the statistics in a new Kauffman Foundation study, the same thing seems to be happening all across Missouri. Kauffman's annual index of entrepreneurial activity ranks Missouri sixth among the 50 states, up from 35th place last year and a dismal next-to-last place showing in 2009.

Chad Stiening acknowledges that there is some degree of irony in the name of his company. After all, Kypha isn’t some quirky nomenclature that comes from a sci-fi nerd’s love affair with an obscure TV show nor is it a futuristic moniker inspired by the cold machinations of some corporate focus group.

It’s simply short for Kentucky Pharmaceuticals.