Company news

Franciscan Alliance has offered to take over Jasper County Hospital in exchange for accepting all of the hospital's liabilities and debt, according to the Rensselaer Republican. A proposed asset purchase agreement was discussed May 13 by a joint meeting of the hospital’s board of trustees, the Jasper County Commissioners and the Jasper County Council. The proposal will have a public hearing on June 1. Jasper County Hospital is a critical-access hospital with 25 beds. In 2013, the most recent year for which financial results are available, its operations pulled in $42.6 million and turned a profit of $1.1 million. Those results were boosted by its 2012 partnership with Parkview Haven Retirement Community in Francesville, which qualifies the long-term care facility for additional federal payments. Jasper County Hospital had liabilities and debts at the end of 2013 of $23.7 million. According to a statement from the hospital, its board of directors had discussions in the last 18 months with Chicago-based Advocate Health, Indianapolis-based St. Vincent Health, Indianapolis-based Indiana University Health and Franciscan, and the lengthiest discussions occurred with the latter two hospital systems. Franciscan Alliance, based in Mishawaka, operates 13 hopsitals in Indiana and Illinois, including three in the Indianapolis area.

Indiana Biosciences Research Institute has named longtime pharmaceutical executive David Broecker as CEO and is working on leasing space in the 16 Tech life sciences quarter near downtown. Broecker, 54, has spent the last year as president and chief operating officer of the institute, which has  already raised $50 million in state and corporate support and aims to hire more than 150 scientists focused on metabolic diseases. Broecker has been recruiting scientists while negotiating with Indiana University to lease 25,000 square feet in the IU Biotechnology Research & Training Center at 1345 W. 16th St. Beginning this summer, that building will be the temporary home of the institute while a developer, Baltimore-based Wexford Science & Technology, studies the feasibility of developing an “innovation district” as part of the 16 Tech area, with the institute as an anchor tenant. Institute supporters include Eli Lilly and Co., Roche Diagnostics Corp., Cook Group Inc., Dow AgroSciences LLC, Indiana University Health and Biomet Inc., as well as the state’s major research universities: IU, Purdue and Notre Dame.

On Target Laboratories LLC in West Lafayette is receiving more than $1.9 million in additional funding to develop an imaging agent that makes cancer cells light up during surgery. On Target has received $1.7 million from Purdue University’s Foundry Investment Fund and its existing investors. In March 2014, the Pension Fund of the Christian Church and Tom Hurvis, founder of Old World Industries, gave On Target $15 million to develop its technology, which was discovered by Purdue chemist Philip Low. On Target has also received a $218,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to determine if combing On Target’s imaging compound, known as ITL38, with another targeting molecule, will light up an even broader array of cancer cells. On Target’s compound is being used in clinical trial for patients with lung, ovarian, pituitary and renal cancer.

Community Health Network plans to spend $175 million to build a hospital on its East campus instead of renovating its existing facility at 1500 N. Ritter Ave., the hospital system announced May 14.  The announcement significantly alters plans Community publicized late last summer to renovate its 60-year-old facility, including an expansion of its emergency room. Community Health Network was founded at the East campus in 1956. Community, which operates eight hospitals in Indianapolis, Anderson and Kokomo, also plans to keep expanding its most active campus. It will build a $60 million cancer center on its North campus in the Castleton neighborhood, it said. Community’s East campus operates 163 beds—far below the 800 beds it once operated in the 1980s. The new hospital, expected to be complete in 2019, will include 178 beds and a new emergency room.

In a bid to get into the white-hot market for drugs that use the body’s immune system, Eli Lilly and Co. will spend $60 million to form a research partnership with a German company focused on immuno-oncology. Indianapolis-based Lilly also promised to pay up to $300 million for each drug BioNTech advances through key development milestones and royalties that could top 10 percent if any of those drugs hit the market. BioNTech will work with Lilly to help a patient’s T cells attack and kill cancer tumor cells. Lilly’s upfront $60 million commitment consists of a $30 million signing fee and a $30 million investment stake in a BioNTech’s subsidiary, Cell & Gene Therapies GmbH. In January, Lilly signed development deals with New York-based Bristol-Myers Squib Co. and New Jersey-based Merck & Co. Inc. to see if their immune-oncology drugs would work in with Lilly’s existing or experimental cancer therapies. A January report by Leerink Partners predicted the immuno-oncology drugs already in late-stages of testing by pharma companies had potential collective sales of $40 billion.