Even as some of its investments bear fruit in grand fashion, the state’s principal fund for investing in high-tech companies may get even less in the next budget than it did two years ago when its funding was cut in half.
Roche Diagnostics Corp. is expanding one of its Indianapolis manufacturing plants to keep up with growing sales of its leading brand of blood glucose monitors.
Shares of biotechnology company Endocyte Inc. rose in afternoon trading Friday, after the company slashed pricing expectations for its initial public offering.
On Feb. 4, 34-year-old Jeremy Stephenson saw 4-1/2 years of work conclude successfully when the JW Marriott complex—1,005 guest rooms in 34 stories and 104,000 square feet of meeting, banquet and exhibit space—opened downtown.
John Merriweather went from the Army at 18—he earned a Commendation Medal in Desert Storm—to a small company in Carmel where he learned all facets of the business, from warehousing to quality control to sales. Now 38, he runs his own firm.
Sanofi-Aventis’s experimental diabetes drug lixisenatide, given to volunteer patients once a day, was at least as effective as Eli Lilly and Co. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s twice-daily medicine Byetta, a study found.
The December sale of Carmel-based Marcadia Biotech to Roche garnered at least $287 million—and as much as $537 million—for the company’s owners and could lead the Marcadia management team to launch a firm using one of Marcadia’s experimental diabetes medicines.
WellPoint Inc. CEO Angela Braly has been working with her counterparts at insurers UnitedHealth Group Inc., Aetna Inc., Cigna Corp. and Humana Inc. in an informal lobbying alliance aimed at blunting parts of the health-care law, according to Bloomberg News, citing unnamed sources. The unofficial alliance might try to formalize in the next two months and may even try to pull in large employers to rally around mutual health-care interests, they said. The five for-profit companies control 39 percent of the commercial, Medicare and Medicaid health-insurance market, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Indianapolis-based WellPoint is the largest health insurer by enrollment, with more than 33 million members in its health plans. The arrangement began about six months ago, growing out of a desire to improve the companies’ image and out of unrest over decisions by America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, the Washington-based lobbyist that also serves hundreds of small plans and nonprofit insurers. Spokesmen at all five companies declined to comment on the sessions or didn’t return e-mail and telephone inquiries. Karen Ignani, AHIP’s CEO, declined to answer questions about the split, calling it “palace intrigue.”
Community Health Network will provide an employee health and wellness center for Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township employees and their covered dependents. The center, to be housed in remodeled space at Community Health Pavilion-Fort Ben (8501 East 56th Street), is scheduled to open in mid-April. The center will focus strongly on engaging school district staff in wellness and disease prevention. Medical personnel will include a “health coach,” who can help patients make changes in their daily health habits to improve health. The coach can assist with anything from smoking cessation to stress reduction techniques, diet and exercise planning. The health and wellness center is an addition to the district-sponsored medical benefit plan. Employees covered under the township plan will be able to continue using their participating provider of choice; however, if they utilize the new employee health and wellness center, they will not pay an office visit co-pay for their visits.
Executives at Endocyte Inc. are now on an investor road show, making presentations in advance of the company’s $78 million initial public offering this month. The West Lafayette drug-development firm plans to offer nearly 5.4 million shares at a price between $13 and $15 apiece, according to a filing Jan. 21 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Underwriters of its IPO will have the option to buy up to an additional 802,500 shares to cover excess demand. Endocyte's key focus is on developing treatments for cancer and inflammatory diseases. The lead product candidate, EC145, is a potential cancer treatment. The company hopes to move it into late-stage development as a potential ovarian cancer treatment. Endocyte said it will trade under the "ECYT" symbol on the Nasdaq exchange.
Noblesville-based King Systems Corp. is without its two top executives after both abruptly left the company on Jan. 26. CEO Don Dumoulin and Chief Financial Officer Yun Kim exited King Systems in a “mutual agreement” with Great Britain-based parent company Consort Medical PLC, said its CEO, Jonathan Glenn. King Systems manufactures anesthesia and respiratory-care products. With 475 local employees, it’s the third-largest medical device developer in the Indianapolis area, according to IBJ statistics. Glenn, who arrived in Noblesville last week to announce the departures, declined to provide specifics on why the two were let go. “The business is fine,” he said. “There’s nothing sinister behind this.” A search is under way for a new chief executive and CFO, said Glenn, noting that a couple of executives from Consort will be overseeing King Systems' operations until permanent replacements are named. King Systems hired Dumoulin, a former Roche Diagnostics Corp. executive, as its CEO in October 2008. Dumoulin, a vice president at Roche, was let go from that company after shipping $11.7 million worth of diabetes-testing equipment in September 2006 to alleged grifter Dina Wein Reis after she convinced him she was running a not-for-profit. Demoulin could not be reached for comment.
Event-planning powerhouse VMS Inc. plans to invest more than $1.5 million to expand its Indianapolis operation and create as many as 102 jobs over the next four years, state officials said Friday morning. The locally based company now employs more than 135 and plans to begin hiring additional workers during the first quarter. Founded in 1995 by Mandy Moore and Neal Rothermel as a meeting-planning firm, VMS found a niche in the highly regulated pharmaceutical and biotech industries and grew from there. It now helps clients manage health care meetings and also assists with strategic marketing, medical-education and patient-adherence initiatives. In 2007, it reported annual revenue of $30 million and a staff of about 70. More recent financial results were not immediately available.
The West Lafayette company does not yet market a product and has not yet reported a profit.
An executive at the Noblesville firm’s parent company said the departures of CEO Don Dumoulin and Chief Financial Officer Yun Kim were the result of a “mutual agreement.” A search is under way for replacements to lead one of the area’s largest medical device manufacturers.
The Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund received $2.6 million from the December sale of Marcadia Biotech to Roche Diagnostics Corp. That represented a 30-percent total return on the state’s $2 million investment in the company. It is the first time the 21st Century Fund has reaped a return on one of the grants it gives to startup companies since the fund rewrote its investment rules five years ago. Before that, it simply made grants that did not have to be repaid if a company hit it big.
Hoosier Village Retirement Center in Zionsville announced plans Monday for a $32 million project that will expand its campus near Interstate 465 and Michigan Road. Hoosier Village plans a 90-unit apartment complex to replace its original residence hall, which was constructed in the 1960s, renovated in the 1990s and expanded in 2001. Hoosier Village currently has 197 independent-living units on its 150-acre campus. Plans also call for a “Memory Support Center,” licensed for residential care of residents with Alzheimer’s and other dementia-related conditions. It will have 36 private rooms and 7,500 square feet of common areas. In addition, the expansion will add a 23,700-square-foot dining center with a 250-person seating capacity, and a community center with exercise rooms, a fitness center, indoor swimming pool and locker rooms. Hoosier Village is a not-for-profit community operated by Baptist Homes of Indiana Inc. The expansion, which should begin this spring and conclude in 2013, will allow the center to add 50 full-time workers. The project is awaiting approval from the Zionsville Planning Department.
Indianapolis-based Arcadia Resources Inc. signed a three-month pilot agreement with the Cleveland Clinic under which the hospital system will use Arcadia’s DailyMed program to help chronically ill patients take their medications after being released from a hospital, thereby reducing readmissions. DailyMed dispenses a monthly cycle of a patient’s prescriptions, over-the-counter medications and vitamins, and organizes them into pre-sorted packets marked with the date and time they should be taken. Also, DailyMed pharmacists call patients, as well as their primary-care doctors and caregivers to encourage medication compliance and avoid drug interactions.
Nearly 300 physicians from Indianapolis-based Community Physicians of Indiana and Evansville-based Deaconess Clinic have joined a research network run by HealthCore Inc., a subsidiary of Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. The Integrated Research Network uses physicians to study drugs, devices, diagnostics and medical methods to see if real-world applications differ from results produced in clinical trials. HealthCore combines its study results with WellPoint’s records on the 33 million Americans it insures. The Deaconess Clinic has about 90 physicians in its multi-specialty physician group. Community Physicians of Indiana employs about 200 general practice physicians for the Community Health Network hospital system. The HealthCore network is currently exploring several opportunities in the areas of heart failure, pain syndromes, antibiotic resistance, Type 2 diabetes and breast cancer.
The state’s principal fund investing in high-tech companies has reached a milestone—for the first time recouping all the money it granted an emerging company, and then some.
If Alliance grows as fast as projected, it could break into the city’s top-10 largest commercial real estate brokerage companies for 2011, based on IBJ’s Book of Lists.
Roche Diagnostics requested a temporary restraining order against Medical Automation Systems Inc. Tuesday after receiving word the company is speeding up plans to sell itself to Roche rival Alere Inc.
Television news veteran Keith Connors will join WTHR-TV Channel 13 as news director Jan. 12, the local station announced Friday.
The Swiss company, which operates its North American business out of Indianapolis, filed a lawsuit late last month against Virginia-based Medical Automation Systems Inc. for breaching the purchase agreement the companies signed back in October.
Observers say conditions are ripening for more deals like the recent $525 million sale of Aprimo Inc. in the months ahead—not only among IT firms, but also among biotech companies here.
Two St. Vincent Health hospitals—Saint John’s Health System and St. Vincent Jennings Hospital—have started using the DOCS4DOCS service provided by the Indiana Health Information Exchange. DOCS4DOCS centralizes in electronic format all the lab results, radiology reports, transcriptions, pathology and hospital admissions reports, discharge and transfer reports from all participating Indiana hospitals, physician practices, labs and radiology centers. The service, which swaps more than 6 million messages each month, is paid for by hospitals and laboratories but provided free of charge to physicians. The exchange, based in Indianapolis, now has more than 80 hospitals and 19,000 physicians participating in its medical-record-sharing services.
Marcadia Biotech Inc., a Carmel-based biopharmaceutical company founded by former Eli Lilly and Co. executives, has been acquired by Swiss life sciences giant Roche. Some details of the transaction will be disclosed in February. Roche’s holdings include Roche Diagnostics, which employs more than 3,000 in Indianapolis at its North American headquarters. Marcadia has about a dozen employees at its 11711 N. Meridian St. headquarters, who have so far been sustained by the millions of dollars Marcadia has raised in venture capital and its partnerships with large drug companies.. Marcadia has been focusing on drugs to treat metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. It previously partnered with drug giant New Jersey-based Merck & Co. Inc. and with Indianapolis-based Lilly. Last June, Marcadia and Lilly struck a deal to develop short-acting glucagon drugs to treat severe hypoglycemia. Roche’s big hope for a new diabetes drug, taspoglutide, had its clinical trials suspended in September due to severe digestive-tract side effects.
Marcadia Biotech Inc., a Carmel-based biopharmaceutical company founded by prominent scientists from Eli Lilly and Co. in 2006, has been acquired by Swiss life sciences giant Roche.
