Both sides of the political aisle are howling that the $6 million transforming Post Road Community Park into the Indianapolis World Sports Park could be better spent. Yet a powerful group of people and organizations says the 48-acre park championed by Mayor Greg Ballard is already paying off and will score even bigger dividends in the future.
Indianapolis-based Language Training Center Inc. plans a $1.5 million expansion that will lead to the hiring of 26 more employees by 2017, the company announced Thursday.
The Indiana attorney general's office last week signed onto a friend-of-the-court brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to exempt public bodies from screening opening prayers for sectarian references.
Plunging revenue from blood glucose monitors has forced Roche Diagnostics Corp. to cut its staff, the company informed the workers last week. Roche, which operates its North American headquarters out of Indianapolis, suffered a 14-percent decline in revenue in its diabetes care unit during the first six months of the year. Roche has put that unit up for sale, according to a May report by the Reuters news agency. Roche spokesman Todd Siesky declined to disclose the number of workers that will be let go, only saying that jobs will be eliminated over the next several months. The cuts will affect Roche’s customer service group in Fishers and its diabetes manufacturing plant on the far northeast side. Between the two sites, Roche employs more than 900 diabetes care workers in the metro area. During the first six months of this year, Roche’s North American sales of diabetes products totaled $224 million. During the same period of 2012, diabetes sales in North American totaled about $257 million. And it’s going to get worse. The price of blood glucose monitors—which account for 90 percent of Roche’s diabetes care revenue—will be hammered by a new competitive bidding process instituted July 1 by the federal Medicare agency. Some projections indicated the Medicare program would drive down its payments 72 percent.
Indianapolis venture capitalist Matt Neff is the new CEO of Indianapolis-based AIT Laboratories, the drug-testing lab founded by Michael Evans. Evans stepped aside once before, in early 2012, and was replaced by Ron Thieme, who had been vice president of information technology. But the move didn’t work out, and Evans returned to the top job that fall. Now, Evans, 69, is stepping aside again, and Neff is becoming chairman, president and CEO, effective Monday. (See related story above.) Evans will remain chairman emeritus and continue as CEO of AIT sister company AIT Bioscience. Neff, meanwhile, is stepping down as CEO and president of CHV Capital, the venture capital arm of Indiana University Health, a post he held for six years. IU Health said the CHV Capital board would conduct a search for his replacement. AIT, founded in 1990 by Evans, then an Indiana University School of Medicine professor, caught fire about 10 years ago when it became the nation’s pioneer in urine drug tests to help doctors monitor patients taking narcotics for chronic pain. But AIT has been in turnaround mode after failing to respond quickly to deep cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates for basic drug tests. In 2009, Evans sold the company to employees for $90 million, with payments to him staggered over a number of years.
Community Health Network and Johnson Memorial Health opened the doors to a new health pavilion that will house doctors from both Community Physician Network and Johnson Memorial Physician Network, including specialists in family medicine, pediatrics, orthopedics, women’s health and general surgery. The facility will also offer walk-in lab testing, an imaging center, and physical and occupational therapy. Indianapolis-based Community and Franklin-based Johnson Memorial formed a partnership two years ago.
One of Indiana’s most innovative companies in the past decade doesn’t make surgical instruments or drugs or engines. It makes water faucets and toilets. Delta Faucet Co. has secured 589 patents in the past 20 years.
Businesses across a broad spectrum are adversely affected when a headquarters is lost. Our firms suffer when goods and services are no longer purchased locally. The mediocre occupancy rate in downtown office space is a direct result of vanishing downtown headquarters.
The morning the news broke that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, people across the country did a double-take. Was it possible that the members of the highest court in the land rendered one of the greatest wedge issues of our time obsolete?
The vacant piece of land on the southwest corner of Main and Sycamore streets, once home to a Citgo gas station, is viewed as a vital link between the historic village and development to the south.
The Indianapolis-based maker of agricultural products, a unit of Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co., said revenue increased 10 percent from the year-ago period.
Marian University, a small Catholic college started by Franciscan nuns, next month will launch just the second medical school in Indiana. Marian President Dan Elsener is credited with pulling off the audacious move with a mix of big dreaming, careful planning, deft networking and “don’t take no for an answer” fundraising.
Eli Lilly and Co. said it will test its experimental Alzheimer’s drug in patients with early stages of the disease after the medicine failed to slow the condition in more advanced patients. According to Bloomberg News, the trial of 2,100 patients, called Expedition III, will measure patients’ ability to do daily tasks like cooking or driving, and to remember words after a delay. Lilly is pushing ahead with the drug, called solanezumab, as potentially the first medicine to demonstrate that it treats Alzheimer’s causes rather than just the symptoms. The drug targets the buildup of plaque known as beta amyloid in the brain that’s thought to be a basis of Alzheimer’s. The trial should take about 22 months to complete. In earlier clinical trials, solanezumab failed to show overall effectiveness, but did appear to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s in patients with mild forms of the disease. Lilly’s new trial will use new tests for biological signs of the disease to help enroll early-stage patients and to see whether their illness is advancing. More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, and the number is expected to surge to as many as 16 million by 2050 as the population ages, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. No drugs on the market have been shown to slow the disease. The market for medicines may be worth $20 billion annually, Deutsche Bank estimated last year. Merck & Co., Novartis AG, Roche AG and other large drugmakers are pursuing treatments.
San Diego-based American Specialty Health Inc., a wellness-program provider, plans to open an office in Carmel by March, employing at least 300 in “an operations, customer service and redundancy center.” Sources familiar with the situation said Carmel may also become the company’s corporate headquarters. Founded in 1987 in CEO George DeVries’ extra bedroom, ASH operates 13 subsidiaries that offer health-and-wellness services to employer groups, health plans and insurance companies nationwide. Its Healthyroads unit, for example, provides a Silver&Fit “healthy aging” program to Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. ASH and other players in the wellness industry are expected to keep growing thanks to provisions in the 2010 Affordable Care Act that create incentives to promote health-management programs. Privately held ASH reported revenue of $221 million last year, up 64 percent from 2009, when the company first appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of the country’s fastest-growing businesses. DeVries is a graduate of Culver Academies in northern Indiana and serves on its board. ASH already has a nine-person office on 96th Street in Indianapolis, and Freeman said those employees eventually will move to Carmel.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. will pay $1.7 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to resolve allegations it left the information of more than 612,000 members available online because of inadequate safeguards. According to the Associated Press, between Oct. 23, 2009, and March 7, 2010, security weaknesses in an online application database left the information of 612,402 people accessible to unauthorized users. That information included names, birthdates, addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, and health data. WellPoint, the nation’s second-largest health insurer, reported the breach to the Health and Human Services Department. The agency then started an investigation, saying WellPoint's actions may have violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
Catarmaran Corp., a pharmacy benefits manager, plans to hire 205 people within two years at a hub it's building in Jeffersonville, according to the Associated Press. The Illinois-based company has committed to hiring 104 full-time, permanent employees next year and a total of 205 by 2015. The jobs paying an average of nearly $24 per hour will include pharmacists, technicians, call-center employees and others.
The trial of 2,100 patients, called Expedition III, will use new measures of cognitive function, such as the ability to do tasks like cooking or driving, or remembering words after a delay.
In the past 18 months, Larry Durkos—who invented a machine that attaches metal bed box springs and coils to wood frames—has scored two stunning victories over Leggett & Platt Inc., a Missouri-based box-spring conglomerate.
Patients who got Erbitux together with chemotherapy as a first-line treatment lived about four months longer than those who got Avastin with chemotherapy, according to the 592-person study.
The $360 million initiative will be formally launched on Thursday by Gov. Mike Pence, executives of five major life sciences companies and officials of the state’s research universities.
Roche Diagnostics Corp. is mulling a sale of its blood-glucose meter business, according to a Reuters report, a move that would cast uncertainty over the nearly 1,000 people working for its diabetes business in Indianapolis. Reuters reported the potential sale May 15, citing three people familiar with the matter. A Roche spokesman declined to comment to IBJ. The entire blood-glucose meter industry faces a huge hit to sales July 1, when the federal Medicare program will start a competitive bidding program for blood-glucose testing strips and supplies. Bidding could cut Roche's payments as much as 72 percent. The Medicare cuts will directly affect a Roche test-strip plant in Indianapolis, which employs more than 150 workers and churns out more than 2 billion strips per year. Roche Diagnostics’ North American blood-glucose monitor sales declined 6 percent last year, to $598 million, according to Close Concerns Inc., a market research firm based in San Francisco. Close Concerns predicts Roche's blood-glucose sales in North America will swoon this year by 23 percent, to $463 million. Reuters' sources said there are only a few possible buyers of Roche’s blood-glucose meter business, including Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc. and New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson.
While its diabetes business struggles, Roche Diagnostics’ laboratory testing business is riding high on the trend of personalized medicine. On May 14, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new Roche test to detect a gene mutation found in about 10 percent of non-small cell lung cancers. That’s important because Switzerland-based Roche’s pharmaceutical business has a drug, Tarceva, that the FDA said could be used in patients with the mutation whose cancer is spreading. The new test is the first approved to detect the epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, gene, according to a Reuters report.
Construction has stopped on a generic insulin facility being built with a $6 million loan from the city of Greenwood. Greenwood attorney Krista Taggart said the city could foreclose on the Elona Biotechnologies facility within the next few weeks unless new investors take over the company. Greenwood officials three years ago approved $8.4 million of incentives for the project, including the construction loan. Elona said then it expected to employ some 70 workers and spend more than $25 million on a planned expansion. Elona told Greenwood officials of financial troubles in late January. In February, the company said it had reached a deal under which the company would be acquired by private investors.
Few observers believed WellPoint Inc.’s explanation that three of its directors all resigned within one week of each other for entirely “personal reasons.” But investors didn’t care. They bid up the Indianapolis-based health insurer’s stock price more than 2 percent last week after WellPoint disclosed the departures of Dr. Lenox Baker, Sheila Burke and Susan Bayh. Two outside observers cast the departures as a positive that allows new CEO Joseph Swedish, a veteran hospital executive, to put his stamp on the company. Institutional investors had criticized the board for a variety of matters, including its 2007 hiring of Angela Braly as CEO. After a series of missteps under Braly’s leadership, the board ousted her in August. “This is normal and it’s probably good for the company to clean out a few of the board members, especially given how long it took the board to come to the decision that it was time to remove the prior CEO,” Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told Bloomberg. “A new CEO always wants the full support of the board.” The company announced the departures just six weeks after Swedish’s hiring and two days before its annual meeting.
Indiana’s life sciences sector is mostly composed of legacy companies.
The future of Indiana’s sprawling health care and life sciences industry might be threatened by an unlikely source: smartphone apps.
Otis R. Bowen, a small-town family doctor who overhauled Indiana's tax system as governor before helping promote safe sex practices in the early years of AIDS as the top federal health official under President Ronald Reagan, died Saturday. He was 95.
Despite her dramatic pleas to a federal judge on Tuesday, Dina Wein Reis, who defrauded corporations out of millions of dollars, will go to prison.
