Los Angeles Clippers owner banned for life by the NBA
Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling has been banned for life by the NBA in response to racist comments the league says he made in a recorded conversation.
Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling has been banned for life by the NBA in response to racist comments the league says he made in a recorded conversation.
Jump IN for Healthy Kids has a budget of $1.5 million and hopes to identify and extend successful efforts to improve diet, activity and healthy choices among children and their families.
Since 2007, the cost of brand-name medicines has jumped, with prices doubling for dozens of established drugs that target everything from multiple sclerosis to cancer, blood pressure and even erections, according to an analysis conducted for Bloomberg News.
Indiana University plans to turn the former Wishard Memorial Hospital campus into a 26-acre, $200 million research complex that would bridge IU’s School of Medicine with the city’s life sciences firms, including those at the nascent 16 Tech business park. The plans call for classrooms, offices, labs and business-incubation space. The university is trying to lure the newly created Indiana Biosciences Research Institute to the facility. And the School of Medicine wants to set up a drug discovery center, which would house 12 of its faculty. IU’s public health and dentistry schools have eyed the complex as a possible home base, said Jay Hess, dean of the IU med school. The former Wishard will also become the new home of the Indiana University Research and Technology Corp, which tries to commercialize the intellectual property created at IU. The IURTC announced in April that it will sell its Innovation Center on West 10th Street.
A highly touted partnership between St. Vincent Health, Community Health Network and the Suburban Health Organization is coming to an end—just 18 months after it began. The Accountable Care Consortium was envisioned as a vehicle through which the hospitals would eventually funnel all of their roughly $2.5 billion in annual contracts with health insurers and employers. Those contracts would have been based on the ability of St. Vincent, Community and the suburban hospitals to keep patients healthy and in need of less care, especially expensive hospitalizations and surgeries. The concept is known in health care circles as “population health management.” The consortium signed up 12 employers as customers—half of which were among the hospitals that formed the consortium. Those hospitals included the 22 operated by St. Vincent, eight operated by Community and six that are part of the Suburban Health Organization. But the hospitals found that changes in the marketplace were happening at a faster pace than they anticipated—making it difficult to coordinate responses fast enough.
Endocyte Inc. stock plunged more than 60 percent Friday after the drug it’s developing with Merck & Co. backing failed to help patients in an ovarian cancer trial. The news could be particularly bad for the West Lafayette-based company, which has no other marketed products. According to Bloomberg News, the Phase 3 study was stopped after an analysis showed that vintafolide didn’t demonstrate efficiency when treating patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, the companies said in a statement Friday. Just over a month ago, Endocyte was being mentioned as a possible premium takeover target after it reported that vintafolide slowed progression of lung cancer and won European backing to treat ovarian cancer. Endocyte said it will continue to test vintafolide for lung cancer, with late-stage data possible toward the end of the year. Endocyte has 70 employees in West Lafayette and 25 in Indianapolis. An Endocyte spokeswoman declined to say whether Endocyte expects to trim its work force as a result of the setback with vintafolide.
Health information technology firm hc1.com promised to nearly triple its Indiana work force over the next five years, adding 175 jobs by 2019. Hc1.com currently employs 93 people, mostly in Indiana. The company makes software that helps medical labs, radiologists and other medical offices manage patient records, bills and other data critical to managing their operations. Hc1.com will invest $2.5 million to lease and renovate 9,466 square feet to expand its existing 16,626-square-foot headquarters in Northwest Technology Park at 96th Street and Zionsville Road. The firm has quietly raised more than $14 million from investors. CEO Brad Bostic told IBJ last year that hc1.com was on track to double its $10 million in annual sales. The Indiana Economic Development Corp. offered hc1.com Inc. up to $3 million in tax credits and up to $100,000 in training grants based on the company’s job-creation plans. The credits are performance-based, meaning the company only receives them once Hoosiers are hired. Boone County is contributing $50,000.
A group of prominent corporate executives has created a new organization to find ways to reduce obesity among central Indiana children. Jump IN for Healthy Kids has a budget of $1.5 million and hired Indianapolis attorney Ron Gifford to spearhead the effort. Jump IN was founded by 17 local executives, including Eli Lilly and Co. CEO John Lechleiter, Roche Diagnostics Corp. CEO Jack Phillips, Anthem Indiana President Rob Hillman, Indiana Pacers President Jim Morris, IUPUI Chancellor Charles Bantz, Indianapolis Star Publisher Karen Crotchfelt, Lilly Endowment CEO Clay Robbins, United Way of Central Indiana CEO Ann Murtlow, YMCA of Greater Indianapolis CEO Eric Ellsworth, and the CEOs of the major hospital systems in Indianapolis. The group hopes to identify successful efforts to improve diet, activity and healthy choices among children and their families—both around Indianapolis and around the country—and then work to replicate or adapt those efforts to reach more people in the metro area. Jump IN hopes to work with schools, churches, employers, medical providers, grocery stores, neighborhood associations and individual families.
WellPoint Inc.’s first-quarter medical enrollment rose 1.3 million from the prior three-month period as WellPoint benefited from new customers through the Obamacare exchanges. According to Bloomberg News, WellPoint has the highest share of enrollments of insurers through Obamacare, with 400,000 on government exchanges through Feb. 14. Those customers also are younger than anticipated, making the company’s prediction of “double-digit” rate increases next year less likely. WellPoint said it now expects 600,000 enrollments through the public exchanges this year. WellPoint's profit swooned in the first quarter, but less than analysts expected. It earned $701 million, down 21 percent from a year earlier. Excluding investment gains and one-time charges, those profits translated into earnings per share of $2.30, down from $2.94 a year ago. But Wall Street analysts expected profit to dip as low as $2.13 per share, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. For all of 2014, WellPoint now expects to earn more than $8.40 per share, up from a forecast of more than $8.20 it issued in March, and a forecast of $8 it issued in January.
David Reed, who once led CBRE’s local operations, has joined Chicago-based DTZ as a managing director, a post that will put him in charge of growing the company’s Indianapolis presence.
Bayer AG’s $14.2 billion acquisition of Merck & Co. is the latest in a series of big pharma deals and it exposes a deepening split in the way drugmakers approach their portfolios.
Attempts to build the sector are making headway, but Indiana still lags leading states.
Turmoil within the USA Cricket Association could jeopardize the organization’s national championship set for Indianapolis’ new World Sports Park in August, though local officials remain confident the event will happen.
The Energy Department predicts retail power prices will rise 4 percent on average this year, the biggest increase since 2008. By 2020, prices are expected to climb an additional 13 percent, a forecast that does not include the costs of coming environmental rules.
President Barack Obama drew attention to girls’ science and engineering accomplishments Tuesday as he announced a mentoring effort involving Indianapolis to improve and diversify the nation’s technological work force.
With new cancer drugs priced as high as $10,000 a month, and insurers tightening payment rules, patients who thought they were well covered increasingly find themselves having to make life-altering decisions about what they can afford.
“Deteriorating” communications with the sponsoring organization forced the decision, the city of Indianapolis announced Friday afternoon.
More than 200 local and national tax professionals and policy makers will participate in the Indiana Competitiveness and Simplification Conference on June 24 at the Indiana Government Center.
Want more police officers? Want those winter-battered streets repaired? Want more sidewalks and street lights? Better parks and green spaces?
WNDE-AM 1260 on Monday yanked Fox Sports Daybreak with Andy Furman & Mike North in favor of a general interest show, but station officials said they remain committed to sports-talk during other times.
Herb Buchanan will join Indiana University Health as president of its Methodist and University hospitals on July 7. He will replace Jim Terwilliger, who was asked to leave that position in January. Since 2012, Buchanan has been CEO of Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C. Before that, he served as chief operating officer for the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. Buchanan earned his MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, as well as graduate and undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively.
Pearl Pathways, an Indianapolis-based life sciences consulting firm, has hired Heidi Hancock Strunk as a regulatory compliance adviser. Strunk previously led the regulatory and quality team at Hologic Corp.'s Indiana facility, and before that held leadership positions at Roche Diagnostics Corp. and Suros Surgical Systems. Strunk holds a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University.
Indiana is in the midst of a revolution and it’s not what you think. It’s not politics, open-wheel racing or even basketball. This revolution is about creating a sustainable health care model for personal wellness and economic growth.
The city needs a strategy to transform into a destination visitors would recognize.
Assembly Pharmaceuticals Inc., which had offices in Indiana, has merged with New York-based Ventrus Biosciences, a publicly traded drug development firm, to create Assembly Biosciences. The new company trades on the NASDAQ stock market under the ticker symbol ASMB. Assembly has been developing antiviral drugs focused on hepatitis B based on the scientific research of Adam Zlotnick, a professor of molecular and cellular biochemistry at the Indiana University Bloomington campus. Zlotnick co-founded Assembly in 2012 with IU chemist Richard DiMarchi; IU biochemist William Turner; Dr. Uri Lopatin, an infection disease researcher based in San Francisco; and Indianapolis entrepreneur Derek Small. Small will be chief operating officer of Assembly Biosciences.
Eli Lilly and Co. signed a $45 million drug-development deal with United Kingdom-based biotech company Immunocore Ltd., according to the Wall Street Journal. Immunocore is trying to develop injectable cancer treatments that would direct the immune system’s T cells to get inside cancer cells and kill them. Immunocore will receive $15 million from Lilly upfront for each of three drug programs that have not yet entered human testing. If Lilly decides to take the treatments into the next stage of development, Immunocore can either receive a fee of $10 million to co-invest and develop the drugs or let Lilly develop the drugs while still retaining a right to future royalties if the drugs hit the market. Last year, Immunocore signed partnership deals with four other drug companies: Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Adaptimmune. Immunocore and Adaptimmune were previously one company called Avidex, formed based on patents licensed from the University of Oxford.
Indiana will be one of up to 20 new states in which Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group will compete on the Obamacare exchanges later this year. The health insurance giant sold on just four Obamacare exchanges for 2014, but will greatly expand its activity selling policies for 2015, according to the Associated Press. In Indiana, UnitedHealth has told the Indiana Department of Insurance it expects to sign up about 5,000 customers via plans sold under the All Savers brand. UnitedHealth representatives have told Indiana health insurance brokers that the company will make plans available for 2015, even though the specific states in which UnitedHealth will sell on the Obamacare exchanges has not been publicly released by the company. The exchanges, which are online marketplaces for health insurance, are the only place consumers can access Obamacare’s generous tax credits to reduce the cost of health coverage. UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley told Wall Street analysts on July 17 that the exchanges will become a more established part of future health care benefits, and UnitedHealth doesn’t want to enter those markets too late.
This isn’t what St. Vincent Health wanted. The Indianapolis-based hospital system’s clerical error of May 5, which sent 63,325 letters about patients' upcoming appointments to the wrong people, is now being cited by the information technology world as an example of the surge in data breaches. Trade publication PC World referred to the data breach at the St. Vincent Breast Health Center in an article headlined, “The 5 biggest data breaches of 2014 (so far)” (although the St. Vincent breach, in sheer number of people affected, wasn’t actually one of the five largest breaches). Also, SC Magazine, a trade publication for IT security professionals, flagged the St. Vincent breach and even posted the letter the hospital system sent to its patients. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, there have been 21 percent more data breaches publicly reported in the United States so far this year, compared with the same period in 2013.