State Auditor Dwayne Sawyer—former president of the Brownsburg Town Council and the first black Republican to serve in a statewide office—said he was stepping down due to “family and personal concerns.”
An Indianapolis firm that makes software for libraries has teamed with an elementary schoolteacher to improve kids’ reading skills by using books’ longtime nemesis—video games.
The proposed Indiana Biosciences Research Institute, backed by Eli Lilly, Roche Diagnostics and other life sciences companies, now has $50 million in start-up funds and has started recruiting a CEO.
It’s no secret the growth of the U.S. economy slowed in the 2000s after the go-go decade preceding it. But the U.S. health care system—hospitals, doctors, drug companies, device makers and health insurers—apparently didn’t get that memo.
Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co., Bayer AG and Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH are among companies that may consider an offer if the Swiss drugmaker proceeds with the animal-health sale.
Reaching the publicly traded level might not happen for anyone in the next year or two, but Indianapolis has several companies (including Jeff Ready’s Scale Computing) that have hoisted themselves out of the often-shaky startup phases and are ready to take off.
A consortium of Indiana University, Purdue University and University of Notre Dame can operate for another five years with the grant funds.
The prolific developer behind Indianapolis’ $155 million CityWay project is working on a plan to transform a key parcel in the heart of downtown Zionsville.
Bring in the relationship experts to label this one. St. Vincent Health and Monroe Hospital in Bloomington have pulled back from their “strategic alignment”—which had St. Vincent managing Monroe’s operations but was a step short of a merger—and will instead settle for a clinical partnership for cardiology, orthopedic and critical care services. Longtime St. Vincent executive Joe Roche, who had led the attempt to integrate the systems, will now become the CEO of Monroe Hospital, starting Monday. “We are appreciative for the opportunity to have explored integration options with Monroe Hospital, and to continue our clinical partnerships to serve the residents of Bloomington and surrounding communities,” Ian Worden, interim CEO of St. Vincent Health, said in a prepared statement. The Bloomington market is dominated by St. Vincent’s archrival, Indianapolis-based Indiana University Health, which owns IU Health Bloomington Hospital there. Monroe, which boasts 32 inpatient beds, was having financial difficulties and had been looking at a partnership with Franciscan St. Francis Health before it struck its deal with St. Vincent last year.
Less-than-expected profit in emerging markets and a decline in the Japanese yen could make it difficult for Eli Lilly and Co. to meet a goal of at least $20 billion in revenue next year, the Indianapolis-based drugmaker said Thursday. But the company said it would cut costs, if necessary, to reach its other 2014 goals of $3 billion in profit and $4 billion in operating cash flow. “I am confident in our outlook to return to a period of growth and expanding margins,” Chief Financial Officer Derica Rice said in a statement. Lilly will also take a hit from Obamacare. The 2010 law, known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, required drugmakers to give larger rebates to federally funded health plans and will add a tax onto all U.S. sales of prescription drugs. Those impacts, as well as Obamacare's elimination of a tax benefit for retiree drug coverage, will cost Lilly about $500 million this year. But Lilly might also see its sales hampered by the Obamacare exchanges, the online marketplaces that started Tuesday in all 50 states. That's because health insurers, in an attempt to keep premiums low, are creating narrower formularies that exclude some drugs from coverage. Similarly, insurers are creating "narrow networks" that offer coverage for fewer doctors and hospitals.
Indiana University Health plans to eliminate 935 workers in Indianapolis, Carmel, Fishers and Muncie, according to documents filed by the hospital system with the state. The cuts will affect 746 in Indianapolis at Methodist Hospital, Riley Hospital for Children, University Hospital and IU Health Physicians. In Carmel, 67 will be cut at IU Health North Hospital. Two will be trimmed at Saxony Hospital in Fishers. In Muncie, IU Health plans 120 cuts at Ball Memorial Hospital. IU Health employs about 36,000 statewide. It says it's looking to save $1 billion in costs over the next four years. The Indianapolis-based system said last month it must make the cuts because fewer patients have been coming to hospitals, and payment rates for its services have been declining.
Publicis Indianapolis, one of the top-billing agencies in the city, will lose about eight employees. President Tom Hirschauer will step down to become a consultant.
Cost pressures are forcing health care providers to extend the reach of limited resources.
The Indianapolis Indians finished their 2013 season with the highest overall regular-season attendance of all 176 Minor League Baseball teams. Profit this year could be double what it was just a few years ago.
The federal Medicare program has decided, at least for now, not to reimburse health care providers who conduct diagnostic imaging tests using an Eli Lilly and Co. imaging agent that can help identify the presence of Alzheimer’s disease. Medicare will pay for those scans if they are part of a clinical trial of a drug and will consider paying for broader use in the future. But Indianapolis-based Lilly, as well as the Chicago-based Alzheimer’s Association, had been hoping for wider reimbursement now. The Alzheimer’s Association noted that it typically takes seven years for a procedure to move from clinical-trial-only reimbursement to broad reimbursement. The narrower use of Lilly’s agent, which is called Amyvid, is a small hit financially for Lilly. The bigger impact is that Lilly hoped wide use of Amyvid could help it and other companies bring drugs to market to treat Alzheimer’s. Since there are currently no effective treatments for the disease, any drug that did help with treatment would be an instant blockbuster. Lilly’s experimental drug solanezumab could have sales topping $4 billion annually if it proves effective in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease. The drug failed its clinical trials last year when tested in a mix of mild and moderate Alzheimer’s patients, but it showed encouraging results in patients with only mild Alzheimer’s disease. The only way to identify such patients is by using a special kind of imaging test that will show deposits of a protein called amyloid—which is one of two telltale signs of Alzheimer’s disease. The imaging test is called PET, or positron emission tomography. Before Amyvid, however, the only way to view these plaques was during an autopsy.
Cancer drug Erbitux, which is partly owned by Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co., extended the lives of patients with a form of advanced colon cancer more than seven months longer than those taking Roche Holding AG’s Avastin, according to clinical trial results released Saturday. According to Bloomberg News, the results were presented at a scientific conference in Europe by Germany-based Merck KGaA, which sells the medicine outside North America. Lilly and New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. market the drug in the United States. Erbitux generated sales for Merck of $1.2 billion last year, while Lilly realized $400 million in revenue from the drug in 2012. According to Bloomberg, the findings suggest that Erbitux, already approved in Europe as a treatment for patients with so-called KRAS wild-type tumors, may have a role in a subgroup of patients with so-called RAS wild-type cancer.
Purdue University chemistry professor Graham Cooks, whose research has played a role in the launch of several Indiana startups, was awarded the 2013 Dreyfus Prize in Chemical Sciences, the highest award possible for a chemist, during a ceremony last week. Cooks won the prize and its $250,000 payment for his innovations in the fields of mass spectrometry and analytical chemistry. Cooks and his team have fine-tuned the tools for molecular imaging for cancer diagnostics and surgery; therapeutic drug monitoring; testing for biomarkers in urine; and the identification of food-borne pathogens, bacteria, pesticides and explosives residues. His research has contributed to the technology developed by Griffin Analytical Technologies Inc., Prosolia, Inc. and InProteo LLC.
In a big disappointment, Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. reported that its experimental cancer drug ramucirumab proved no better than a placebo as a treatment for breast cancer. According to the Associated Press, the Indianapolis-based firm no longer plans to seek regulatory approval for the drug as a treatment for patients with a form of breast cancer that has spread. However, Lilly will seek approval to use ramucirumab in combination with chemotherapy in stomach cancer patients after ramucirumab performed better in a separate study on those patients. Ramucirumab extended both overall and progression-free survival times for patients with advanced gastric cancer. Lilly will seek approval from regulators for that use. It also is studying ramucirumab in colorectal and lung cancers and expects more late-stage research results next year. Ramucirumab is one of Lilly’s best hopes to produce new revenue to offset the loss of sales it has been suffering since the 2011 patent expirations on its then-best-seller, Zyprexa, and the patent expiration coming at year’s end on its current best seller, Cymbalta.
In a plot right out of Jurassic Park, Thomson Consumer Electronics’ old brands such as RCA and Proscan have been revived from old DNA. They’ve been licensed to companies around the world including Indianapolis-based company that operates as RCA Commercial Electronics.
Part of the funding will go to an existing study of drugs from Eli Lilly and Co. and others to see whether they can ward off the disease in people who inherited genes that predestine them to get Alzheimer’s.
Indianapolis Business Journal gathered leaders in the state's commercial real estate and construction industry for a Power Breakfast panel discussion Sept. 13. The following is an unedited transcript of the discussion.
The nonstop connection to Silicon Valley that Indianapolis’ tech community has been clamoring for is here, but a leading advocate for the service said it doesn’t meet his industry’s needs.
Joel Trusty realized that if he could remove all the atmospheric pressure from a chamber, he could turn liquid—even liquid inside a cell phone—into a gas at a much lower temperature than otherwise possible.
TWeatherford Inc. was launched in 2006 as a reseller for additive manufacturing equipment, often called 3D printers or rapid prototypers. It has done well with the machinery sales and rentals, but has begun providing actual manufacturing services on a larger scale.
