Ten projects will receive a combined $234,000 in funding from the Tree for Every Delawarean Initiative to plant more than 4,600 trees.

ferrard Thu, 10/25/2018 - 14:10

ferrard Wed, 09/02/2020 - 10:08

The House of Representatives is set to debate the general principles of a bill seeking to provide a sustainable source of funding for the National Youth Service Corps, for the training and empowerment of corps members. Titled “The NYSC Trust Fund (Establishment) Bill 2024,” the proposed legislation, sponsored by the lawmaker representing Nasarawa/Toro Federal Constituency

Read More

Responsibility for the funding of cancer medication is set to be taken over by the Health Ministry from the Malta Community Chest Fund • Minister announces Paola Health Hub set to launch operations this week

Education Cannot Wait (ECW) has delivered quality education to children in crisis “against all odds,” ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif said at the United Nations today. “And you can imagine the odds. We are seeing more armed conflict, a growth of climate-induced disasters and the biggest refugee movement since World War 2.”  Education Cannot Wait’s […]

The Head of Impact Assessment and Adaptation, Henry Neufeldt, UN Environment Programme Copenhagen Climate Centre, has called for increased climate adaptation funding, particularly for developing nations facing significant climate risks. UNEP’s latest report reveals an acute adaptation finance gap, with current international funding for developing countries at USD 30 billion—far below the USD 200 to 400 […]

Officials in New York City have quietly told hundreds of migrants that the city will stop funding hotels in upstate Albany in December.

The post NYC Warns Migrants Funding for Upstate Hotel Rooms Is Ending appeared first on Breitbart.

FDA’s mission is “at risk” because of inadequate funding. So says Alliance for a Stronger FDA President Diane Dorman, testifying before the FDA Science Board. Her remarks come 5 years after the Science Board made a similar declaration, concluding that decades of underfunding had left FDA without the resources to fulfill its mandate and make science-based decisions. Congress responded with more monies for the agency, but since then the FDA’s workload has increased even faster. The current threat to FDA comes from two sources: four major new laws to implement since 2009; and changes in the environment in which FDA operates, notably acceleration of globalization and increasing scientific complexity. Ms. Dorman’s remarks are reprinted below. If you care about FDA, FDA Matters urges you to read her testimony, go to the Alliance’s site (www.StrengthenFDA.org) and join.

At a time when FDA’s responsibilities continue to grow rapidly, the agency has been caught in an across-the-board reduction (sequester) in federal discretionary spending, effective March 2, 2013. Although Congress may yet reverse course and restore money to affected federal agencies, this is not considered a high probability. Altogether, FDA will lose about $209 million between now and September 30, 2013. This will reduce inspections, slow drug and device approvals, and restrict implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act and other recent legislation. Because of the many questions about the process and outcome, this is FDA Matters’ primer on the sequester of FDA funds.

By Mike Cloonan, CEO of Sionna Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC An insightful piece on this blog following the JPM healthcare conference noted the “refreshing burst of enthusiasm” in the biotech sector. It’s true

The post Lessons From A Private Funding Round: Science, Relationships, And Experience appeared first on LifeSciVC.

This new 10-minute TEDMED talk is getting quite a bit of attention:


 (if embedded video does not work, try the TED site itself.)

In it, Roger Stein claims to have created an approach to advancing drugs through clinical trials that will "fundamentally change the way research for cancer and lots of other things gets done".

Because the costs of bringing a drug to market are so high, time from discovery to marketing is so long, and the chances of success of any individual drug are so grim, betting on any individual drug is foolish, according to Stein. Instead, risks for a large number of potential assets should be pooled, with the eventual winners paying for the losers.

To do this, Stein proposes what he calls a "megafund" - a large collection of assets (candidate therapies). Through some modeling and simulations, Stein suggests some of the qualities of an ideal megafund: it would need in the neighborhood of $3-15 billion to acquire and manage 80-150 drugs. A fund of this size and with these assets would be able to provide an equity yield of about 12%, which would be "right in the investment sweet spot of pension funds and 401(k) plans".

Here's what I find striking about those numbers: let's compare Stein's Megafund to everyone's favorite Megalosaurus, the old-fashioned Big Pharma dinosaur sometimes known as Pfizer:

	Megafund (Stein)	Megalosaurus (Pfizer)
Funding	$3-15 billion	$9 billion estimated 2013 R&D spend
Assets	80-150	81 (in pipeline, plus many more in preclinical)
Return on Equity	12% (estimated)	9.2% (last 10 years) to 13.2% (last 5)

Since Pfizer's a dinosaur, it can't possibly compete with the sleek, modern Megafund, right? Right?

These numbers look remarkably similar. Pfizer - and a number of its peers - are spending Megafund-sized budget each year to shepherd through a Megafund-sized number of compounds. (Note many of Pfizer's peers have substantially fewer drugs in their published pipelines, but they own many times more compounds - the pipeline is just the drugs what they've elected to file an IND on.)

What am I missing here? I understand that a fund is not a company, and there may be some benefits to decoupling asset management decisions from actual operations, but this won't be a tremendous gain, and would presumably be at least partially offset by increased transaction costs (Megafund has to source, contract, manage, and audit vendors to design and run all its trials, after all, and I don't know why I'd think it could do that any more cheaply than Big Pharma can). And having a giant drug pipeline's go/no go decisions made by "financial engineers" rather than pharma industry folks would seem like a scenario that's only really seen as an upgrade by the financial engineers themselves.
A tweet from V.S. Schulz pointed me to a post on Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline blog. which lead to a link to this paper by Stein and 2 others in Nature Biotechnology from a year and a half ago. The authors spend most of their time differentiating themselves from other structures in the technical, financial details rather than explaining why megafund would work better at finding new drugs. However, they definitely think this is qualitatively different from existing pharma companies, and offer a couple reasons. First,

[D]ebt financing can be structured to be more “patient” than private or public equity by specifying longer maturities; 10- to 20-year maturities are not atypical for corporate bonds. ... Such long horizons contrast sharply with the considerably shorter horizons of venture capitalists, and the even shorter quarterly earnings cycle and intra-daily price fluctuations faced by public companies.

I'm not sure where this line of though is coming from. Certainly all big pharma companies' plans extend decades into the future - there may be quarterly earnings reports to file, but that's a force exerted far more on sales and marketing teams than on drug development. The financing of pharmaceutical development is already extremely long term.

Even in the venture-backed world, Stein and team are wrong if they believe there is pervasive pressure to magically deliver drugs in record time. Investors and biotech management are both keenly aware of the tradeoffs between speed and regulatory success. Even this week's came-from-nowhere Cinderella story, Intercept Pharmaceuticals, was founded with venture money over a decade ago - these "longer maturities" are standard issue in biotech. We aren't making iPhone apps here, guys.

Second,

Although big pharma companies are central to the later stages of drug development and the marketing and distributing of approved drugs, they do not currently play as active a role at the riskier preclinical and early stages of development

Again, I'm unsure why this is supposed to be so. Of Pfizer's 81 pipeline compounds, 55 are in Phase 1 or 2 - a ratio that's pretty heavy on early, risky project, and that's not too different from industry as a whole. Pfizer does not publish data on the number of compounds it currently has undergoing preclinical testing, but there's no clear reason I can think of to assume it's a small number.

So, is Megafund truly a revolutionary idea, or is it basically a mathematical deck-chair-rearrangement for the "efficiencies of scale" behemoths we've already got?

[Image: the world's first known dino, Megalosaurus, via Wikipedia.]

Between August 2006 and July 2007, we received a claim for 26 million USD in barbed wire and pickets. While these items are no doubt helpful in protecting outposts, the claim figures are highly suspect.

Eva Longoria :30 English

St. Baldrick�s Foundation grants reach the best research far and wide, funding both individual doctors and groups of institutions focused on childhood cancers and their cures. Every cent benefits children everywhere.

AACR Survey and Cancer Progress Report 2015 Video

Dr. David Weinstock of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute discusses his LLS grant

The funding of British Olympians makes it impossible for emerging sports to develop, says the chief executive of British Handball.

Nicky Hunt expects to challenge for a medal at Rio 2016 after learning she will receive full Olympic funding from Archery GB.

Fruits of new investments in CGIAR could include big boost in rice production for Asia, sustainable irrigation for millions of parched farms in Africa, and dramatic drop in forest destruction tied to agriculture. Washington, D.C. and Montpellier, France — CGIAR, the world’s largest agriculture research partnership, today announced its funding has doubled from $500 million […]

The post CGIAR doubles funding to $1 billion in five years first appeared on International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

Bridging gaps between research, policy and implementation can make cities flood-resilient.

The post Our cities are flooding but funding has dried up first appeared on International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

State, National Long Term Care Leaders to Warn of Growing Threat to Washington Seniors' Care in Wake of Legislative Sess

The recommendations have been made in a joint report of 'India-Japan Business Leaders Forum' 2016 which was presented to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe here on Friday.

Couchbase, the Santa Clara-based company behind the eponymous NoSQL cloud database service, today announced that it has raised a $105 million all-equity Series G round “to expand product development and global go-to-market capabilities.” The oversubscribed round was led by GPI Capital, with participation from existing investors Accel, Sorenson Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, Glynn Capital, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Online language learning continues to be a huge opportunity for startups, with the most engaging experiences meeting a surge of interest from consumers looking for more productivity out of the hours that they spend on their smartphones. In one of the more recent developments, a language learning app called EWA — which has built a […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Companies across the board are fighting to recruit and retain employees as the war for talent rages on. Employee benefits are no longer viewed as a cookie-cutter, standard set of offerings — rather, they are valuable tools employers can use to differentiate themselves from competitors and attract top candidates. Forma, which just changed its name […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Two young Australian innovators are ready to take their ventures to the next level after sharing in $20,000 in seed funding from PwC during a live pitching event held by the Foundation for Young Australians.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif urges developed nations to provide USD 6.8 trillion in climate funding for developing countries by 2030.

Why Orios Venture Partners wants to double down on clean tech and climate investments

Ninad Karpe, Founder and Partner, 100X.VC, spells out the early mover advantage in venture capital

Cornerstone Venture Partners on how specialisation can deepen a start-up’s value proposition

Why Seafund Venture India Trust focuses on early-stage technology startups

Anicut Capital zeroes in on investment opportunities that banks overlook due to regulatory constraints

The event will take place in Bangalore from December 9-11, 2024, and on December 12 in Mysore

CynLr will now expand its 60-member core team into a 120-member global team

One-year-old Sierra focuses on selling artificial intelligence-powered customer service chatbots to enterprises

Earlier in October, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in funding from investors which could value the company at $157 billion

The baby from Ballari district in Karnataka has undergone three complex surgeries in Bengaluru through crowdfunding

At the COP16 negotiations in Colombia, countries failed to figure out how they would mobilise $200 billion a year in conservation funding by 2030

The oncology sector continues to evolve with innovative solutions leveraging AI, robotics and genome sequencing

India ranks 6th amongst the top nine deeptech ecosystems globally

The nuclear physics hub needs to finance the construction of the Future Circular Collider as its existing particle accelerator — famed for discovering the Higgs Boson — edges toward the end of its useful life

Director Venkatesh Maha talks about taking the crowdfunding route for his new Telugu film ‘Marmaanuvu’ asserting he will not let down the film-loving audience

International Monetary Fund